Have you ever planted mint in a well-watered garden? Probably not more than once. The stuff takes over, doesn’t it? Pretty soon you have more mint than you could use in a candy factory, and you’re hacking it back, treating it like a weed. Most people don’t mind a bit of mint,1 but most of us like other flavors, too — dill, basil, thyme, and others — and we’d like those to have places to grow without getting choked out by mint. Also, we’d maybe like to spend our time encouraging other things to grow, and not uprooting the mint.
Sometimes, when a trans person posts something, commenters ask questions which don’t seem to come up when a cis person posts something. The questioners are often well-intentioned. They’re often seeking genuinely to understand. And, when a trans person posts from an explicitly trans perspective, naturally the topic is often gender-related. So, gender comes up in these conversations, and fair enough. What is “a woman”? What is “a man”? When someone is apparently, in every way, one gender, but says they’re a different gender, what does that even mean? Is that real? Are there caveats?
But those questioners have just planted mint in the garden. And there’s a place for mint. Just not where you’d like to grow the thyme and the basil. Not in every garden.
When this happens, when a questioner wants to interrogate an aspect of gender, the trans poster can easily start to feel that it is their gender which is being interrogated, and not just the abstract concept of gender. There are many reasons why. Among them:
1. Gender as an abstract notion requires an act of will, for a trans person. Gender is very specific, for us. It has consequences, and some of them hurt.2 This disparity in life experience between cis and trans is just about the definition of the difference between a cis person and a trans person. One excellent definition of “trans person” is “a person whose gender is not universally considered valid.”3
2. People4 often do question the gender of trans people, and challenge it, and deride it, and try to define it. So this is a repeating, reiterating, recapituling, recurring, life experience for trans people which happens frequently, a lot, over and over, again and again.5 If the questioner were the first, it would not be an issue. But the questioner is the 10,000th, even though this is the particular questioner’s first visit to this garden. That ground has been pounded flat. It’s hard for a green shoot to gain purchase, and the people who live there are pretty tired of the dust kicked up as visitors walk around and ask Important Questions.6
3. Some people, with every good intention, try to spin the question artfully, to ask the question about gender in general (not your specific gender, no!) in an effort not to attack a trans person, to depersonalize the interrogation. They want to spare the trans person the pain, and so they talk about hypotheticals. But there’s no bright line, and pretty soon the trans person is aware that they are at the focus of the questioner’s attention, and the question “What is this?” is really a stand-in for “What are you?” — which is a really dicey question to ask, especially when the questioner knows what the trans person has already said on the topic. So, well-intentioned gender-in-general conversations also become poisoned.
4. Some people, with no good intentions at all,7 ask questions about gender in general as a rhetorical device, so that they can attack a specific person’s gender while retaining a semblance of plausible deniability. This further poisons discussions about gender generally.
5. These definitional questions recur again and again on trans people’s posts about all kinds of topics, but they almost never appear on cis people’s posts, unless the cis person has actually raised the topic themself. This is not a coincidence; it is a reflection of that fact that the gender of cis people is unquestioned. Individual commenters aren’t wholly to blame for this–we’re all stewing in cissexism here–but when they can’t acknowledge the pattern, trans people tend to shut down and lose interest in talking further. This is a rational, self-protective response.
So, trans people get tired of these questions. They can be good questions. Tasty, even. But they have their place, and often it’s not in the comment thread below a different topic, or a more specific topic.
Sometimes you don’t want mint.
But what about the people who want mint? Shouldn’t there be a place to enjoy the mint?
This is that place. Welcome to the mint garden! Rimonim and I have decided to tend this garden, and since “gender” is an enormous topic, it’s a big garden. We can’t take credit for the underlying landscape; there are interesting sight lines and repeated themes and grand vistas and little meditative hollows.
All we’re going to try to do is keep the mint hacked down to where the view is clear.
Rimonim and I wrote what’s above a few months ago, intending to get back to it, and he was busy, and I was busy, and we hadn’t pushed it forward… and then Caitlyn Jenner transitioned and suddenly everyone is critiquing her and talking about what makes a woman and spinning off conversations.
One of those conversations is in the the recent open thread, where Christopher and dragon_snap and Phil are having what strikes me as a very careful and caring conversation on this very topic. I reproduce it here, with some formatting fixes. I’ll comment as I have time.
I hope this isn’t somehow over the line, but I found that Vox FAQ to be, well, confusing.
I still don’t quite understand what gender identity is.
So, I actually have tried similar thought experiments to the one described at the beginning of the article; gender and sex are a minefield of complicated ideas, so I decided to imagine something fairly simple. I switched out the terms “man” and “woman” for height terms.
“Okay, I’m [six feet tall], but imagine my mind was telling me that I was [five feet tall], I might wish that I weren’t [six feet tall]…”
And I had to stop there because I was already engaging in anti-trans language. Look at what happens when I switch it back:
“Okay, I’m [a man], but imagine my mind was telling me I’m [a woman], I might wish that I weren’t [a man]…”
If I were to describe a trans woman as “a man who wishes to be a woman”, that would be considered extremely transphobic in most trans-friendly circles.
The more acceptable description seems to be that a trans man is “[A man] who was assigned [a female gender] at birth. A trans man has always been [a man] for their whole lives.”. It’s very common to hear that a trans man has always been a man, and a trans woman has always been a woman.
But if I try to turn it back around I get “I am [a five foot tall person] who was assigned [the height of six feet] at my last checkup. But I’ve always been [five feet tall]”
That’s harder for me to wrap my head around. I’m clearly using the term “five foot tall person” to refer to something other than a measurement on a ruler, but I’m not sure what that something is.
Especially when we get to this part of the article:
Keisling and Ziegler explained that not all trans people undergo medical treatments to change their physical traits, perhaps because they are comfortable with their bodies,
So a trans man may well be okay with having a (for lack of a better term) “female” body, which means that when he calls himself a man he’s not talking in terms of what his body is, or what it should be. In fact, it seems entirely possible that he may wear “women’s” clothes; I think we can all agree that a man can wear a dress and it doesn’t magically make him stop being a man.
But I get stuck on this; if that trans man isn’t using the word “man” in terms of facts related to his biological sex, and he’s not using the word “man” to describe an effort to conform to societal gender roles, what does the word “man” mean in this context?
I’m not saying “Rargh, he’s not really a man” because in order to do that I’d first have to have a definition of what it meant to “really” be a man. And I don’t. I’d really like to know what the definition is.
@ Christopher
I’m not trans, but I do have a gender identity, and as a woman, a queer person, and a trans* ally (to the best of my ability), I’ve thought about all this quite a bit.
1) You might find Julia Serano’s description of her experiences with ‘gender sadness’ illuminating. This is taken from a page on her old blog, but I highly recommend her book “Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity” if you are interested in transgender issues, sexism/feminism, or intersectionality.
i doubt i could adequately describe what “gender sadness” feels like to someone who is not transgendered. i suppose that in some ways it is similar to other kinds of sadness. for instance, you know that feeling you get when someone you love more than anything breaks up with you? and it’s about a month or two after the big break-up and you are trying to get on with your life. but no matter how busy you keep yourself, thoughts about that person just keep popping into your head about 100 times a day, and everytime they do you feel a bit of sadness. well that’s kind of what gender sadness felt like for me during most of my life. while i was always struggling with it, i could still go out and have a few laughs or go about my business and be relatively productive and happy for the most part. but unlike most types of sadness or grief, which tend to get a little less intense with every day that passes, gender sadness just keeps getting more and more intense. and by the year 2000, i had reached the point where the sadness felt more like what one feels on the actual day of the big break-up, when you can’t concentrate at all and you are totally consumed with thoughts of the person you loved. that’s how i felt almost every day: consumed with gender sadness. literally every other thought i had was about gender, about my pain. i could not get around it. it sucked all of the life out of me. i stopped calling friends, stopped writing songs and listening to music, i would go into work and just stare at the computer screen without really doing anything. it hurt as much as any other pain (physical or emotional) that i had ever felt before. and i knew there was only one way to ease that pain: transitioning.
2) It might be helpful to consider that different aspects of a person’s identity are of varying importance to different people. For instance, to some people, their nationality might be an important part of their self-concept, self-image, and their sense of who they are (i.e. their identity). For some others, their nationality may be only a very small portion of of what they consider to be their core self. The same can be said of pretty much any other trait or attribute – religious background, sexuality, profession, ethnicity, (dis)ability, family role, etc. And of course, it likewise applies to gender idenity. For instance, though I have a fairly specific and narrow range of gender expressions within which I am comfortable, I don’t have a strong innate gender identity (though I identify ‘politically’ – for lack of a better term – as a woman, and with womanhood, due to the historical and current myriad issues with sexism, strict gender roles, etc). I sometime describe my gender identity as ‘shy’, because if I ‘put it in the spotlight’ by thinking about it too hard or too long, I end up feeling uncomfortable and upset. It’s pretty neutral or androgynous though I think, and somewhat fluid. (Sometimes I feel like ‘one of the boys’, and sometimes like ‘one of the girls’.) It’s also worth noting though that I feel very much at home in AFAB (assigned female at birth) body, and I identify strongly as cissexual.
3) There are many aspects of a person’s biological sex. Some of the main facets:
– hormones: estrogen and progesterone vs. testosterone
– hormone cycles: approximately monthly vs. daily
– chromosomes: there are two sex chromosomes, X and Y, and many configurations of one or more copies of the X chromosome and zero or more copies of the Y chromosome in humans. Chromosomal testing is very rare, so we don’t really have good data at all about how common the various arrangements are in general, or how they correlate – if at all – with being cisgender, transgender, and/or intersex.
– secondary sexual characteristics, eg: breasts vs. facial hair and deepened voice
– primary sexual characteristics: genitalia
– gametes: egg cells vs. sperm cellsNow if a trans woman, for instance, has the hormones, hormonal cycle, secondary sexual characteristics, and genitals commonly associated with being female, unknown chromosomes, and no male gametes in her body, there is a very strong case to be made for her to be considered ‘biologically female’, and it certainly would be very difficult to assert that she was ‘biologically male’. Moreover, many cisgender people lack one or more of the listed factors (eg, post-menopausal women, men who have received radiation therapy, women who have had a mastectomy, etc.), yet we would not consider them to be less ‘qualified’ to be considered ‘biologically’ female or male, as applicable, nor would we doubt their experience of their subjective gender.
Many trans people have spoken or written about their experiences with HRT (hormone replacement therapy) in similar terms to the following memorable passage (emphasis in the original):
I’ve been on estrogen for nearly eleven weeks, and I still count down the hours (seven) until I can take my next dose. […] It’s hard to describe, but everything just feels more natural now that my mind and body are no longer flooded with testosterone. It’s as though after 23 years, I have finally stopped trying to fill up a diesel car with unleaded gas. My brain was made to run on estrogen.
As well, I think it’s worth noting as well that many trans people experience body dysphoria and social dysphoria as distinct but related phenomena, which they they may experience at different levels of severity. Additionally, there are a great many physical changes that can be effected via HRT, electrolysis, and various non-genital surgeries. And of course there’s really no way to tell what genitalia someone has without looking at them naked from the waist down — which really never comes up an interactions with someone who isn’t an in-person intimate partner, and sometimes not even then!
Sorry my comment was so long; I hope there was some stuff in there that was helpful or interesting.
I want to write a comment here that discusses a question that Christopher raised and also some of my own mental stumbling blocks when it comes to trans issues and gender issues. I do not intend to be impolite, but it is possible my comment here may be triggering for people who are struggling with these issues in a more personal way.
But I get stuck on this; if that trans man isn’t using the word “man” in terms of facts related to his biological sex, and he’s not using the word “man” to describe an effort to conform to societal gender roles, what does the word “man” mean in this context?
This is a question that I’m honestly trying to find a meaningful answer for.
I understand, as a writer and a progressive and a person who generally doesn’t want to cause people harm, that it is polite to refer to a trans woman as a woman, to use the pronouns that she prefers, and to use the name that she requests. I have no problem with that, and I understand that this use of language might be more than just politeness but might contribute to a space where someone feels safer.
In other words, I don’t want to sound transphobic or to do things that are transphobic. But, on another level, I don’t want to be transphobic. I can say that Janet Mock (for example) is a woman, but it feels like I’m being dishonest unless I also believe that Janet Mock is a woman.
Now, I don’t hold the belief that Janet Mock is a man, or that she is not a woman, or that being trans is a third sex. But if I’m going to hold the belief that she is a woman, then I feel like I need to understand what a woman is such that Janet Mock fits the criteria.
This might sound like a transphobic thing to say, and if it does, I’m sorry, but for me, finding out the answer to that question is the key to not being transphobic.
At the moment, the best I can glean is that a woman is a person who identifies as a woman (and a man is a person who identifies as a man). That’s functional from a rhetorical perspective, but it does render some common narratives illogical. (How can you, as a child, feel like “a person who identifies as a woman” — there must be something more, beyond simple identification, such that a person can reasonably say, “I have always known I was a woman” or “I have always known I was a man.” Or, “I did not change from being a man to being a woman, I changed what I identified as,” etc.)
The Guardian essay says this about Rachel Dolezal:
Dolezal might feel an enormous affinity to blackness – so much that she decided to identify as black – but her decision to occupy that identity is one that was forged through her exposure to black culture, not a fundamental attribute of her existence.
I feel like the Guardian essay engages in the logical fallacy of question-begging: Rachel Dolezal is not black because she is only choosing to identify as black, but trans people are the gender they identify as because they actually are that gender.
Guidelines:
So. At least two trans people (Rimonim and I) will be participating in this thread. Other trans people are welcome, too. However, since this is a thread for people to ask questions which may be shredding, fellow trans people, please participate only if you’re feeling sufficiently callused. Please look after your own resources and do not use up spoons you need for something essential.
Cis people are welcome, too (indeed, essential to the effort, since your questions are explicitly centered). We would appreciate it if you would make an effort not to be cruel, but we do want this to be a thread where people can interrogate matters like those I mentioned at the top. So, please do the best you can, and if you say something awkward, or poorly-phrased, or weirdly-conceived, we trans people will do our best to engage with it anyway.
All people, please remember that each of us only actually has one perspective. No single person has all the answers, and no single person can embody all of whatever it means to be “trans” or “cis” or “male” or “female” or “bi-gender”, or what-have-you.
Lived experience counts for a lot. If someone says that something happened to them and you don’t understand it, ask for clarification. DO NOT declare it to be impossible. Example: in a recent online discussion, Dana Beyer, who is an out trans woman who was assigned male at birth, casually referenced a traumatic incident in her life: her first period. Commenters scoffed and declared that it was patently impossible for a trans woman to have a period, and therefore everything she had said was suspect. Had they bothered to try to understand, they could have asked her. Or they could have googled her name and a few keywords, and discovered the key to understanding her comment: that Beyer is Intersex, and when she hit puberty, the unseen and unguessed-at uterine tissue in her abdomen started doing what uterine tissue does, and sloughed tissue… through the only aperture structurally available to it, her penis.
So, please, ALL people: when someone reports a life experience which you don’t understand, strap on your best humility and try, before you render judgement. Thanks.
I really hope we can have a good discussion. Again, welcome.
Grace
- I love mint. [↩]
- So we’re clear: not just hurt like “that hurt my feelings” (though heaven knows that’s corrosive enough as an hourly diet) but hurt like “those broken bones are going to cost a lot of money and keep me out of work.” [↩]
- Hat tip to http://nodesignation.wordpress.com/definitions/ [↩]
- and not always cis people [↩]
- It is, so that you cannot mistake my meaning, something which trans people experience a very great deal. [↩]
- Sometimes that ground is pounded and salted so hard that even well-watered mint won’t take hold; Jan Morris, upon being asked for an interview, is reported to have replied with one sentence: “When I hear the word ‘gender’ I reach for my pistol.” [↩]
- at least, not toward the trans person [↩]
Christopher:
It wasn’t a great FAQ. I found myself skimming. Words, words, words. “Too many notes.”
My instant reaction to that in my head was, “That’s not gonna work.” :)
Your problem is framing. In your height analogy, you’re constructing a person who is physically six feet tall, but feels like they’re five feet tall. And that’s the historically standard definition of “trans woman”: a person who is physically a man, but who feels like a woman. (And then, if you’re progressive, you used to say, “But who has BECOME A WOMAN because GENITAL SURGERY”, and if you’re reactionary you used to (and still do) say, “And who has TRAGICALLY MUTILATED HIMSELF [note the misgendering] in pursuit of an unrealizable fantasy”, and you also discount the 90+% satisfaction rate for trans surgeries, possibly by quoting that one Catholic doctor who always gets quoted, or that one guy who transitioned and detransitioned and now advocates that no one should ever transition because his experience is totally universal and all transitions are doomed.)
So in your height analogy, probably without realizing it, you assigned primacy to the body.
But if you had to pick one and decide which was more important, which defines you, your body or your mind? If you are a cis man and tomorrow you step on a landmine and your genitals are blown to shreds, are you no longer a man?
Trans people usually spend a long time trying to believe the assignment we’re given. But we can’t change our minds. (Our souls, if that floats your boat.) And eventually, if we transition, we decide to change what we can to get some relief from the dissonance.
But for us, the inexorable experience of who we are is far more important than the snap judgement someone else might make, on glancing at us and seeing certain physical cues. It would be more important for you, too, but for you it’s effectively not there until you hear us report it, because you can’t see it for yourself.
As my colleague Diana Powe put it,
That has certainly been my experience. Once my physical transition was far enough along, suddenly people acted toward me as though they could see me, and that was new.
No single trans person embodies all the possible qualities of trans people generally, any more than any single tree embodies all the possible qualities of trees generally. dragon_snap stole one of my favorite distinctions and got it right: you can separate gender dysphoria to some extent into physical dysphoria and social dysphoria. Any given trans person probably experiences both to some extent, but may experience much more of one or the other. My own dysphoria was both, but weighted more to social.
Point being, I think you’ll find it’s very rare that someone identifies as trans but is completely fine with his body AND his social interactions. The problem might be mostly one or the other, or both, but it’s not going to be neither.
Also, remember that all transition steps have a price. Sometimes a minimal step will enable you to get the dysphoria to shut up, and you can get some peace. So if you are a trans man and your dysphoria is mainly social, but you have surrounded yourself with people who are willing and able to treat you like a guy, you may be able to get by without those physical changes which make it a lot easier for the people around you to accept you as a guy. And you may therefore decide not to risk the various risks of testosterone.
Likewise, if you’re a trans woman who mainly has physical dysphoria, you may be able to transition hormonally and get facial electrolysis so that you can be more comfortable in your body, but still butch it up to go to work presenting as a man.
The main point of the frequent emphasis on the fact that not all trans people get aaaaaaaall the medical interventions is to try to head off at the pass the argument that someone isn’t really trans if they didn’t dot this particular “i”, or that they are less trans than someone else.
So I think your hypothetical trans person who is totes comfortable socially in the assigned gender AND totes comfy in their body is (a) rare as hen’s teeth, (b) the exception that proves the rule, and/or (c) cis. All that definition is trying to do is to be inclusive of the all the variations in how someone can be trans.
There are details, but in discussions like this they tend to be devilish, so let’s not start with those. When you wear them all down to the core, the best functional definition, the one most likely to steer you right, is this: a man is someone who says sincerely that he is a man. It’s not a perfect definition, but it’s hard to find a more functionally useful one.
Grace
Phil:
I don’t understand the question you pose, here. Why is it difficult to imagine a child, assigned at birth as a boy because of visible male-typical physical characteristics, who knows with certainty that she is a girl? Can you expand on, or re-state, what you mean by “there must be something more”?
Grace
Thank you for inviting us into the garden. It smells great in here.
I can’t say what Phil meant with his question, but I struggle with a similar question.
As far as I understand, gender roles are defined by society. And contemporary American society prescribes a range of roles more or less appropriate for each gender. For example, Conan the Barbarian, James Bond, Albert Einstein, Liberace, and the Dali Lama are all examples of men.
Could anyone say that he identifies with ALL these roles? Or is there some unifying qualify of male-ness that runs through all these examples, enabling a person to say, “I identify with Conan the Barbarian, James Bond, Albert Einstein, Liberace, the Dali Lama – you know, that type.”
Or can a person identify as a man without identifying with a social role? And if so, what does this say about the binary nature of gender? Does this suggest that male-ness and female-ness have objective qualities that transcend mere social roles?
Nobody.really:
That’s kind of the whole major battle.
Feminists, or more precisely a large group of people within feminism, believe that gender is created by society and not essential to a being. The blank slate. They HAVE to use that as an assumption, it is even sneeringly called Feminism 101 to people who question it, and if that assumption is removed, lots of their models and theories and constructs simply fail.
On the other hand, some transsexual people use essentialism as an assumption. They, on the other side, also have to use this assumption in their models and theories and constructs or they fail. If there is no innate maleness or femaleness, then … there are problems, or more than just problems, with the world view.
So you have this constant battle, sometimes very spiteful. There are “TERF” feminists (gender is only nurture) and, on the other hand, there are transsexuals who claim that maleness or femaleness is basic (gender is nature not nurture).
Cis person here but I don’t get Phil’s and nobody.really’s issue.
Why is there a need for a child (or any of us) to be able to define “man” or “woman” or “girl” or “boy” before one can state an affinity? Does a kid need to be able to define “green” before she can say it’s her favorite color? Does she have to have seen and recognized every possible variation of green before we can accept her declaration that it’s her favorite color?
I think what Phil is struggling with (and myself as well) is “what exactly are you stating an affinity for?” In the color example, a child can prefer green to red..he doesn’t need to be able to define the precise wavelength of reflected light, pointing to the toy with the color he prefers is sufficient. But if everyone else in the world is color blind, that’s going to confuse them. Likewise if two children both insist that they prefer green, but one points to a blue toy and the other to a yellow one, that will be confusing. So it seems to me that while preferences can be entirely personal, it’s hard to have a conversation about “favorite color” without an agreed upon framework for the concept of “color”.
So as was already mentioned, it’s mentally hard to reconcile “gender is a social construct / gender roles area negative thing” with “I am not a person who chooses to identify as male, I am innately a male”.
I do appreciate the description of social vs. physical dysphoria – that’s very helpful! Especially since it’s always been hard for me to totally reject the notion of biological gender (in the sense that I think there are some innate “male” and “female” characteristics rooted in biology.
Thank you for hosting this – as a cis person who wants to be inclusive of trans people, but doesn’t encounter too many, I’m grateful for an opportunity to pose questions even if I muddle them a bit in my inexperience.
Wow, the mint garden is a fabulous place and I’d like to visit from time to time… to be clear, are comments and questions relevant to gender but outside the current thread welcome? The garden could be a whole blog unto itself.
Funny you would phrase the question that way.
As I understand it, the electromagnetic spectrum (including the visual portion of the spectrum) is continuous, without any (or only minute quantum) breaks in the range of wavelengths represented. That is, the phenomenon of color is continuous. The number of distinct colors you recognize is a function of the society in which you were raised. For example, some societies make no distinction between blue and green.
Thus, for a child to say that green is her favorite color, she must first have been enculturated into a society that arbitrarily identifies a span of the electromagnetic spectrum and labels it “green.” That same child, raised in a different culture, would probably not be able to make that distinction – not because her eyes are different, but because her mind is.
No, the child may not have any awareness of the cultural underpinnings of her preferences. Indeed, she might even say that she was born with a preference for green – even as social scientists admonish that cultural phenomena are not innate but must be learned.
The point is not to constrain, delegitimize, deny — or affirm — anyone’s statements; the point is to understand them.
That same child, raised in a different culture, would probably not be able to make that distinction – not because her eyes are different, but because her mind is.
Actually, it’s both. That’s why some men don’t see red and green. They are even people who don’t see colors at all. And there are a few people who are able to discern many more colors than the average person, apparently because of their cones. In addition, there is a difference between light color primaries and pigment color primaries, which is why mixing paints is a different process than mixing lights.
So color identification is mix of the personal, the social, the medium. The child might point to something and say it’s green and you might see it as yellow. Or you might both see it as green but she would see it as something very attractive and you would find unpleasant. In neither case could you say that the child saying her favorite color is green is wrong; you could only say that one thing she is calling green, you don’t and that one she finds attractive, you don’t.
At any rate, color is complicated, our individual responses to it are complicated, and we don’t actually know if what we are seeing is what other people are seeing. And I may have pushed the analogy to gender identify as far as it can go.
Continuity of electro magnetic spectrum is irrelevant. Rods and cones are discrete. There is no in principle difference between the mechanistic nature of color perception versus any other sense perception. The words we use may vary, but color blindness generally relates directly to physical attributes such as missing or defective rods or cones. The extent that you can’t tell the hypothetical child that her perception of green is wrong is the same as the extent to which you can’t tell her that her perception of a piece of music is wrong. Some portions of that perception might be subjective, but if she says it’s 3/4 time and it’s 4/4, she’s just plain wrong.
Not that this has anything to do with gender identity, really.
I think that cis people should respect trans people’s identities and pronouns.
That’s the beginning and the end of the “what does gender mean” debate for me. Pretty simple, huh?
The way I always put it in my philosophy courses was “ideas are never more important than people.”
People suffer, fall in love, starve, orgasm, work, bleed, dream, and poop (They do some other stuff too. I hit the highlights.). Ideas do none of these things. I’m going to privilege ‘things that do this stuff’ over ‘things that don’t.’
Respecting trans people’s identities and pronouns is a ‘people’ thing.
Debating the origins of gender is an ‘ideas’ thing.
So it’s not that it’s not interesting. It is! It’s fantastically interesting! It’s just that whatever answers we come to on the idea stuff, people stuff still wins. At least for me.
—Myca
PS. Thanks for building The Mint Garden. It’s a great idea. :)
And now a word from our sponsors….
Sure, but I thought the whole point of this “garden” was to talk about what those concepts mean, where they come from, why they matter so much, etc. I’m on board with respecting trans people – but I would like to understand / empathize with them better too.
Question I have: since it seems agreed that transgender consists of both social and biological sources of dysphoria, does transgender as an identity cease to have meaning if society removes strong gender roles, or technology removes or strongly diminishes the biological gender differences? Does it matter?
For example, consider “career” as something that has a strong cultural/social value, but minimal biological component. Obviously different cultures build up around different fields, and people strongly identify with their careers, but (generally in the modern world) you aren’t assigned a career at birth. There is little stigma about transitioning to another career – the idea of a “trans-lawyer” seems silly.
Or something obviously biological, but with little social consequence, like hair color. People might prefer one color or another, but little judgement is assigned to this. You don’t catch much flack if you decide to dye your hair brown one day and blonde the next. We don’t think of “trans-blondes”.
So if feminism successfully knocks down all social expectations for gender, or we invent a pill that can flip all the biological markers of gender, does that make the transgender identity disappear? What do we lose if it does? It seems like many trans people consider “trans” to be an important part of their identity, even if they otherwise identify strongly with one of the binary genders. Would it therefore be a harm to transgendered people if we removed this source of identity?
One thing that someone once used to explain to me the confusing mix of nature and nurture that is gender identity made a lot of sense:
– Societies differ both from place to place and over time, especially on a span of hundreds or thousands of years, and understandings of gender and the roles assigned to people of each gender differ with them. A society’s understanding of what it means to be a man or a woman can shift a lot just in a couple decades. Examples: the shift between Europe’s Middle Ages, when women were believed to be sexually rapacious and less moral than men, to the Victorian era, when women were believed to lack an innate sex drive and were viewed as guardians of morality who “kept men in line”; or the changing view of femininity and masculinity over the course of the 20th century; or the existence of third genders in cultures around the world.
– Individuals’ identities are shaped both by their innate characteristics and by their environment. Two people who have a great sense of humor innately, but are raised in societies that consider different things to be funny, will learn to tell different kinds of jokes to make people laugh. Two people whose tastebuds make them prefer sweet things, but live in societies with different culinary traditions, might find themselves preferring different meals if one society traditionally serves sweet things for breakfast and another society serves sweet things for dessert. Two people who have equivalent artistic talents but live in different eras will likely pursue different art forms (cubism vs. realism, impressionism vs. manuscript illustration) based on the art they’re exposed to while they’re developing their skills. I think (?) most people are probably comfortable with the idea that your innate character traits are influenced by your environment, including your society, so that you can end up expressing them differently under different circumstances. This includes shaping the way you view yourself and, if you know you feel a certain way, shaping your understanding of what that feeling *means*.
– So, given that different societies define/understand/treat gender differently and the way people express their innate characteristics is influenced by society, the same person with the same starting traits at birth, cloned and placed in two different societies, can end up with a different view of their own gender, because their society has influenced how they think about themselves.
The example given by the person who explained this: A woman in the 21st-century U.S. might feel perfectly comfortable identifying as a woman because enough of her inner feelings of how she is align with how society feels women can be that the divergences are minor and don’t bother her. But if she were transplanted back to the 1830’s and suddenly had to put up with a Victorian idea of womanhood, even if she had been raised there, there might have been enough contradictions between her inner self and Victorian womanwood that she would not be wholly comfortable with it. A different person might be fine with the “same” (or most closely analogous) gender in either century, as millions of people in the 1800’s undoubtedly were, but some people today, whose gender identity is congruent enough to their modern assigned gender to be getting on with, would not find a different society’s view of that gender congruent enough to suit them. And in that society, they might be trans.
They might or might not end up identifying as trans if the society also never taught them that that was possible, but the dissatisfaction with their assigned gender would probably not be any less real in that case.
This explanation was meaningful to me because it not only really helped bring the seemingly-conflicting ideas of socially constructed gender and innate gender identity into harmony for me, but also gave me a neat explanation for why I’ve never quite felt comfortable with my gender, although it’s not a strong enough feeling for me to stop calling myself cis: if a modern woman might feel like just a couple too many of her traits didn’t jive with the Victorian view of womanhood, I feel like it’s just a couple of my traits that don’t jive with modern (white, American) womanhood. But I might fit into the womanhood of the year 2115 just fine. And people who feel much more strongly than I do that they are not their assigned gender but a different one, are just reacting to the fact that more of them fits the other gender than their assigned gender.
It really made sense to me when it was put in those terms. I would like to hear if anyone has other thoughts on that theory, either for or against it.
Grace:
Sure. First, it isn’t difficult to imagine such a child, since we both know that the experience you describe happens in the real world all the time. But for that statement to have meaning, the words have to have meanings that we can agree upon.
If I said, “Imagine a child who is absolutely confident that they are a snarfleboffle, and yet another child, who was raised as a snarfleboffle, is quite certain that they are a giggitywumpwump. However, a third child is very comfortable identifying as a fiffendoffer.”
You can probably imagine it, but what you imagine and what I imagine will be very different things unless we can find some agreed-upon definitions for “snarfleboffle,” “giggitywumpwump,” and “fiffendoffer.”
To say that a child knows with certainty that she is a girl is to imply that there is a concept called “girl” and that this concept has boundaries that are defined enough that a person can either be it or not be it with certainty.
I was raised in the U.S. and enculturated with a definition of “girl” and “boy” that developed over time–and I suspect the process was similar for most people, be they cis or trans. At first, I honestly think I thought that “girl” meant “person with long hair” and “boy” meant “person with short hair.”
That definition shifted while I was still very young, and it probably became something like “boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.”
At some point in my life, I would have understood that a man whose penis is blown off in a land mine is still a man, and those definitions changed again, perhaps to: A man is a person whose body is predisposed to possessing the biological characteristics of a male.
Further on, the definition would have shifted to “A man is a person who is genetically XY and whose body displays some or all of the primary and secondary characteristics of maleness.”
Eventually, I must have learned about genetic anomalies and intersex individuals, and I would have learned that gender/sex is not binary, even on a biological level.
At some point, I probably expanded my definition of “man” to include more, such as “A man is a person who is genetically XY and whose body displays some or all of the primary and secondary characteristics of maleness, AND/OR a person who has undergone medical procedures to blah blah blah (have male hormones, or have male physical characteristics, or whatever. It’s an outdated definition, as you pointed out.)
And now, in 2015, I feel like I know a little bit more, but I don’t have the tools to describe the definition of man/male anymore. I know what does not define maleness:
1) It’s not about the genitals, and it’s not about any single physical characteristic or any combination of physical characteristics. (A man can have a vagina, or long hair, or breasts, etc.)
2) It’s not about any one activity or action or any combination of activities or actions. (A man can have a job, or stay at home, etc.)
3) It’s not about any emotion or personality trait, or any combination of these. (A man can be strong, or weak, or dominant, or passive. Etc.)
But if I carve away every possible thing or combination of things that make a person a man, at some point there is nothing left. And that’s why I say that there has to be something more, if–and it’s a big if–a “man” is an actual concept that exists in reality such that a person can either be or not be a man.
I appreciate the thoughtful and helpful responses people have given me.
Grace Annam:
Well, my body would still have a lot of “male” characteristics even if part of it were destroyed.
I did do a lot of thinking about this recently. I was imagining if aliens abducted me, and somehow copied my mind into an inorganic computer that controlled a giant spaceship, so that I somehow maintained my personality but had no body at all, no hormones, no chromosomes, no primary or secondary sexual characteristics, nothing physical at all.
If that happened, I asked, what would be left that would make me a man?
And the answer for me was “Well, nothing really.”
I thought “Well, what do I mean when I call myself a man?” And basically I decided that it’s two things:
1) I have a “male” body and if it has any female characteristics nobody has yet noticed them.
2) Because I have a body that looks a certain way, I was socialized into various male gender roles, so certain things feel more socially appropriate to me.
Now, the gender roles are pretty much entirely socially constructed; I would feel extremely self-conscious walking around in a cocktail dress, but from a young age I started growing my hair out and not cutting it, and that was fine. Had I grown up in the 50s instead of the 90s, I might feel just as self-conscious about not cutting my hair.
The thing about gender roles is this; I don’t call myself a man because I wear trousers and I’d be uncomfortable in skirts. Rather, I wear trousers and would be uncomfortable in skirts because I have a body that society calls male, and I was socialized in a way society thinks is appropriate to socialize people with male bodies.
Something I think everybody in modern America (And probably most other modern cultures) agrees with is this: I could put on a dress and make-up and still be a man. In fact I could adopt every female gender role I could think of, and I could still tell people “I am a man” and they would accept it; the kinder people because they’d want to respect my self-identification, and the crueler ones because my body would still appear male.
So my gender role is essentially a reaction society had when it decided I had a male body.
So to go back to your original question, if you take away my body, leaving only my mind, what makes me a man as opposed to a woman? As far as I can see, nothing.
I think that’s an extremely unusual reaction, incidentally. I suspect most people, cis or trans, wouldn’t agree with it, but like I say, I’m not quite clear why. The feeling that gender has some kind of primacy that exists prior to the physical body actually seems hugely important to a lot of cis people, and I think it directly lies behind much policing of trans bodies. If I’m born with a cleft-palate body, or a near-sighted body, and I want to use surgery to change that body in order to reflect my own idea of what my body should be, that is generally accepted. If I want to have gender reassignment surgery, that suddenly prompts a lot of navel gazing crap about how I should learn to live with my body as it is and that my body has a purpose, even though as far as I can see all of those interventions are about changing my body to suit my own desires or needs.
See, I hadn’t heard that distinction before, but I think that helps me understand better.
I apologize if I’ve misunderstood, but if I understand what you’re saying, it’s that physical dysphoria would be the feeling of knowing that your body should be a certain way, and the social dysphoria would be the feeling of needing to fit into a certain gender role, and be recognized as a person who is legitimate in that gender role?
It is important to respect the words people use for themselves. For example, Christopher is my real name. And names are important things despite being social constructs which don’t have much particular content. Not only is “A ‘Christopher’ is somebody who says sincerely that they are a ‘Christopher'” a pretty good definition of a name, it’s also perhaps the only one.
If I told you my name was Christopher, and you responded with “Eh, you don’t look like a Christopher to me, I’m going to call you Carmelita” that would be rude. The context would change how it was rude; refusing to use correct names can be anything from a mistake to a silly joke to a threat or even a way to dehumanize prisoners.
The fact that “Christopher” is essentially an arbitrary and completely meaningless* collection of syllables I was assigned at birth doesn’t change the fact that I really am a Christopher and that is my name.
So I have no problem with the idea that “A man is somebody who identifies as a man”; the term “man” doesn’t need to mean anything more than that to be important, just as the name Christopher doesn’t need to mean anything more than that to be important.
The thing is, I then start to wonder about any research that says trans peoples’ brains differ from those of others. I would find it very hard to accept a study that claimed to identify the way the brains of Christophers differed from the brains of non-Christophers.
It starts to make a bit more sense to me if I separate the body and social dysphorias into distinct categories; perhaps physical dysphorias are rooted in the brain, while the social dysphoria is a more personal response to socially constructed gender roles.
Gbdub asks a question above that I’m curious about: If social gender roles disappear, does social dysphoria disappear as well?
*It means “Christ bearer”, yes, but I am not a Christian and even if I was, there would be no way of knowing whether it would accurately describe my relationship to faith. Its meaning as a word is unconnected to its meaning as my name.
Here is a long post that I tried to write yesterday and restarted several times.
I want to start out by saying that I’m not trying to offend anyone, and I’m not trying to be unreasonably argumentative. As I mentioned in my previous post, I understand that it is polite to refer to a trans person as the gender/sex by which they identify, to use the pronouns they prefer, to use the name that they wish to be called, etc. I understand and agree and have no problem with that.
I also understand that it’s not polite to walk up to a trans person on the street, or at a party, and grill them about their gender or the nature of human gender in general.
My problem is that I feel like I’m engaging in transphobia if I don’t actually believe that a trans person is the gender that they present as. I don’t want to act in a transphobic way, but I also don’t want to be transphobic, and so I guess I am trying to fix myself, and it’s my own problem, not anyone else’s.
Now, it would be easy to say, “Well, damn, Phil. Just suck it up. You’ve got the script down, you know enough to keep people from thinking you’re an asshole, so why bother giving a shit?”
Perhaps my struggle will make more sense if I explain something about myself. I believe in objective reality. Some things exist, and some things don’t, and the way you think or feel about an objectively real thing doesn’t affect its nature. This is very important to me–some might say maniacally important, and I suppose it stems from being raised in a bullshit religion and being fed bullshit about the nature of the universe by well-intentioned individuals, and then eventually having a huge, life-changing falling-out with religion that is probably the defining moment of my entire life.
So a big part of the cognitive dissonance I’m feeling is probably a byproduct of being raised as a very devout Christian, and then, over time, coming to the realization that there is no god, there is no heaven and hell, there is no supernatural, and that we’re all just an accidental result of various physical processes that began an unimaginably long time ago.
The belief that there is no supernatural also informs the way I think about lots and lots of the stuff that other people believe in—on either side of the political spectrum. There are no ghosts. There is no life after death. Little children didn’t die and see heaven and come back. There are no angels. Water doesn’t have “memory.” Reiki healers do not channel “life force energy.” “DNA Activation” is bullshit. Feng shui does not enhance the positive energy in your home. Geminis are not more tense and restless than the general population. Etc.
It is axiomatic to me that believing in something does not therefore cause that something to be true. Wanting something to be true does not make it true.
Obviously, it is possible to respect and love a person even if they hold a belief that I know to be false. Most people on this planet believe in things that aren’t true.
But I have a right to disbelieve in things that aren’t true. (Also, when it comes to most things, including the examples I listed above, I am correct. I don’t view objective reality as a matter of opinion. It’s not “Jackie believes she saw the spirit of her grandmother in her bedroom last night, and I believe she didn’t.” It’s “Jackie believes she saw the spirit of her grandmother in her bedroom last night, and I know she didn’t.” It might be rude to express the facts that I know to be true to Jackie, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s wrong. Politeness doesn’t dictate objective reality.
Now, it’s possible that you can discuss something in a meaningful and accurate way by changing the definition of the thing you’re discussing. For example, if you start talking about the feng shui of our shared office space, and I point out that feng shui is bullshit, and you explain that when you say “feng shui,” you are referring to the process of arranging elements of interior design in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to human beings, well then, yes—feng shui, by that definition, is not necessarily bullshit.
If you say that you’re a Jew, I will of course accept and acknowledge this piece of information about you. But if you define “Jew” as a person who belongs to a tribe chosen by God, that’s bullshit. If we define “Jew” to mean a person who can trace their lineage to the ancient Hebrew people of Israel, then that’s not bullshit.
Definitions matter. And it’s possible for a word to mean more than one thing, or for a category to include more than one type of thing. We could, for example, define “Jew” to mean a person who can trace their lineage to the ancient people of Israel, AND/OR a person who has chosen to follow the religion of Judaism, then that’s still a reasonable definition. But if you add a third category, “AND/OR a person who belongs to a special tribe chosen by God,” then you’ve taken a reasonable definition and added bullshit to it.
So I guess what I am really hoping to do is to develop a definition of “man” and “woman” (or “male” and “female,” etc. etc.) that is inclusive and fair and non-bigoted, but that doesn’t contain any woo-woo logic.
Myca writes:
So it’s not that it’s not interesting. It is! It’s fantastically interesting! It’s just that whatever answers we come to on the idea stuff, people stuff still wins. At least for me.
I love this.
Sarah writes:
They might or might not end up identifying as trans if the society also never taught them that that was possible, but the dissatisfaction with their assigned gender would probably not be any less real in that case.
That feels like a really helpful way to think about this.
Grace:
If you have had the patience to read this bulky comment so far, perhaps you can understand why I released a frustrated sigh when I read that. First of all, you’re using the word itself in its definition. That’s like saying “A tree is a thing that looks like a tree” or “A genius is a person who believes themself to be a genius.”
But this definition is also problematic because it positions sex/gender as something that isn’t objectively real. The quality of being a man is contained wholly in the belief that one is a man, and nothing else. Full stop.
Which, if that’s the way it is, so be it. But that’s basically the “star-bellied sneetches” view of gender. And the whole point of that book was that all of the sneetches were exactly the same and the stars on their bellies didn’t matter. At all.
If that were the case, then that would mean that if Person A misgenders Person B, and Person B has a problem with that, then the problem lies with Person B, not with Person A. I can’t imagine anyone currently writing in this thread agrees with that.
Phil:
Which, if that’s the way it is, so be it. But that’s basically the “star-bellied sneetches” view of gender. And the whole point of that book was that all of the sneetches were exactly the same and the stars on their bellies didn’t matter. At all.
If that were the case, then that would mean that if Person A misgenders Person B, and Person B has a problem with that, then the problem lies with Person B, not with Person A. I can’t imagine anyone currently writing in this thread agrees with that.
I’m not sure that your second paragraph follows. To go back to what Christopher said about the similarity with names, if Person A keeps using the wrong name for Person B because they think it’s funny and want to give Person B a hard time, the problem lies with Person A, even when there’s nothing inherently offensive about the other name. Even an innocent mistake with your name can be annoying. (Some coworkers of mine made a running joke of calling someone a name that sounded exactly the same except one letter, nothing inherently funny about the other name, because an instructor kept calling him the other name by accident. I’m pretty sure he found it annoying, and I’m pretty sure that my coworkers expected him to find it annoying, and in fact that was the point of doing it.)
I remember when I was a small child (a cis girl) being very concerned about what were “boy things” and what were “girl things”–most of those things were clearly cultural. I guess I think of this as “gender orientation”, analogous to sexual orientation. I assume that trans people usually have this same experience, but not with a gender matching the one they were assigned. And yet, being able to remember this experience doesn’t make it make any more sense to me. I do have similar thoughts to Phil as far as “what does being a man/woman even mean?” I think by being able to remember and being introspective about my childhood experiences and knowing that it doesn’t help me to make sense of “what does identifying as female mean?”, it makes me not expect anyone else to exactly know, either, including trans people. I suspect that if it means anything, it means feeling like you’re in the same category as your same-gender group of your peers; IOW, what group you see yourself as part of. Going back to nobody.really’s comment at #3, maybe it’s not about any particular uniting quality or biological reality besides the brain being predisposed to identify two gender groups (and to identify with one or the other in the case of people who identify as either male or female).
First, Grace and Rimonim, thank you for this post and this thread. I have learned from each of your contributions to this blog. I’ve been reading through people’s responses so far with great interest, and something Christopher wrote got me thinking:
I think the word feeling in this formulation is hugely important.
Children are not born with a gender, if by gender we mean something that is both separate and distinct from sexual physiology/biology and that is socially and culturally constructed. I do not mean by this to suggest that there might not be something innate in a child’s brain that does or does not align with its sexual physiology/biology, but that thing does not become a gender, or cannot be associated with a gender, until you name it as one, and once you name it as a gender, you are in the realm of nurture, not nature—or, perhaps more accurately, your are talking nurture’s impact on nature.
That thing, in other words, might have an objective reality, but that reality is socially and culturally meaningless until we name it. So: a body born with XY chromosones, a penis and testicles, and so on—to take the example of my body—has an objective reality, but it is not a male body until we name it so. More to the point, it is only the body of a person who can, in traditional terms, grow up to become a man because we have (traditionally) assigned maleness—meaning having been born with a penis, etc.—as a necessary condition for appropriately performing masculinity and achieving manhood.
There is, in other words, no thing/body called male or man (or woman or female)that exists objectively, that is separate and distinct from its sociocultural construction as male/man or female/woman. What this means is that the feeling that cis people have, as Christopher put it, that “gender has some kind of primacy that exists prior to the physical body” is also socially constructed; it only exists because we have terms like male/female and man/woman that have socioculturally determined meaning. Without this feeling, the gender binary would not feel like “the natural order of things.”
Which raises the question of understanding how we go about creating that feeling, of thinking about what it would mean to interrupt the creation of that feeling.
On a more immediate and practical level, though, it is for me the best explanation of why Grace’s definition, i.e., that a man/woman is someone who sincerely says he/she is a man/woman, is the one that makes the most sense. Indeed, I think it only stops making sense if you assume that the terms man and woman can somehow point to an objective reality without coloring that reality with all the sociocultural baggage the terms carry by definition.
Darn it, you guys! I go away for ten or twelve hours, just one shift, and I come back here to find…
…a caring and thoughtful discussion.
Awesome!
I’m just going to read through in order, and cherry-pick those things where I think I can say something worthwhile.
SWA:
For the record, I’m a feminist, but I’m well aware that I don’t speak for all feminists, or for Feminism. I’m one voice.
It’s true that many feminists have made that argument (though I think the evidence is against it). However, a lot of feminists, and sometimes the same ones, have also made arguments which are biologically essentialist, though they don’t seem to realize it, specifically for the purpose of excluding trans women from woman-only spaces. “Trans women don’t bleed, trans women don’t fear pregnancy,” and a lot of other statements which boil down to, “If you don’t have body parts which produce these particular experiences, you aren’t a woman.” Except, of course, that for every specification there are examples of people who don’t fit the spec but whom everyone would agree is a woman. (For instance, some women don’t have a uterus, or don’t menstruate for some other reason, but are to all outward appearances typically female and were assigned as such at birth and treated as such from the get-go.)
Ain’t THAT the truth.
For the uninitiated: “TERF” stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”. TERFs label it a slur and don’t like it when you use it, but it was actually coined by radical feminists who recognize trans women as women, full stop, and who wanted to distinguish their radical feminism from TERF radical feminism. In my opinion, it is simply descriptive. If you are a radical feminist (RF) and you believe in excluding trans women from women’s spaces (TE), then you are a TERF.
Note that TERFs do NOT believe that “gender is only nurture”. If they did, they would welcome trans girls who have been raised as girls from an extremely young age (basically as soon as they could say, “I’m a girl”), but they reject those trans girls, too… because they don’t bleed, or similar. It’s a very biologically essentialist argument, and directly contrary to one of the earliest feminist slogans I can remember hearing: “Biology is not destiny,” meaning that your physical form does not dictate your social role or life options.
Gbdub:
A typical pattern of social interaction? In many small ways, we all interact a little differently with men and women. Our society requires it of us. Many of them we’re typically not consciously aware of, but they’re there, and they inform our experience.
Recently I took a young adult into protective custody because he was thinking of killing himself. I have known his mother casually for 25 years, but this is the first time I’ve seen her since I transitioned. Three times in a twenty-minute interaction, she gave me a hug. She has never given me a hug before. I touched her gently on the arm as I was saying something comforting in a way which I had never done with her before. These are EXAMPLES, only, to illustrate the heart of the thing: we were interacting as two women, where before, she had interacted with me as she would with a man, and I had interacted with her via the male persona I had constructed over the years. It’s not the hugs (in uniform, I kinda prefer not to, actually) or the touch on the arm; individually, these are nothing. It’s the membership, the knowledge that I am a woman, and she is a woman, and that’s how we’re going to interact, as two women.
She also used my old name three times… and caught herself and apologized on two of them. …but she stood closer to me while doing it, as women in our society tend to do. In other words, the name was habitual, but the back of her brain was looking at me and saying, “Woman” and guiding her actions accordingly. Which made the mistakes with my name utterly forgivable.
It’s an affinity for being considered a member of a group which tends to cluster in this pattern of behavior rather than that pattern of behavior.
annqueue:
Hard to know without seeing the question, but in general, the closer the question bears on questions like “What is a man?” or “Who is a woman?” the more likely it is to be on-topic for The Mint Garden.
Myca:
I very much agree. Any time someone hews closely to a philosophy, and in doing so hurts someone, especially directly and specifically, it’s time to take a long, hard look at the philosophy. It better be worth the cost it exacts in human pain.
Gbdub:
I don’t know, and I think this is probably not knowable with current human societies. Maybe we’ll find out, millenia hence.
But I’d like to back up. First, I have found it works better to talk about “transgender people” than about “transgender” as a noun or “transgenderism” (a term I dislike). Using the latter two terms, it’s a lot easier to get very abstract and to forget that we’re talking about people. So as a matter of good practice which helps keep priorities straight, I recommend talking about people. This is a small manifestation of Myca’s point.
Also, transgender as an identity is slippery. Many trans people would object if you said they identified as transgender. Depending on the context I might or might not be one of them. For many people, probably a significant majority, it’s just a descriptor, not an identity. I’m a woman and I identify as a woman. But you can use the transgender adjective to qualify my designation as a woman when that’s a necessary distinction, because I’m a woman who was assigned male at birth, and that has had a lot of consequences which sometimes need to be referenced. But if you asked me to pick the word which best describes me and presented me with a choice between “woman” and “transgender”, I’d take “woman” every time. A majority of trans people would, I think, though there are trans people for whom the fact that they are transgender is very important, a distinction earned through suffering and claimed with pride.
Food for thought.
Christopher:
That’s true of most men, and I accept that it’s true of you. The example is intended to address the penis=man equation, to demonstrate that it’s not a universal equation.
I think that an inorganic computer could not maintain your personality — that is, simulate it perfectly — without also perfectly simulating the processes underlying it, including the hormonal systems, adrenal response, and so on. In other words, you might no longer have a body in the physical sense, but you would have a perfectly simulated online replica of one.
That’s a really interesting way to look at it, and I think I’m going to have to chew on that for awhile. Thank you.
Heh. Yes. If you tell someone with a cleft palate “God doesn’t make mistakes”, you’re an asshole, but if you tell a trans person “God doesn’t make mistakes” you’re … pious.
I think that’s a pretty good re-statement. I could quibble, but I’d have to cut it fine to do it. :)
I’m inclined to say that you’re in the ballpark, though I would caution against cutting the two apart too completely, since your physical appearance very much influences your ability to be perceived as who you are; plenty of trans people (including me) have sought physical changes specifically because it would make social acceptance vastly easier. I think that social dysphoria is also rooted in the brain, but differently.
Phil at #18, I had what seemed like a beautiful and helpful response in my head, and then it got all muddled when I wrote it down, probably because I’m very tired. I will try for clarity again tomorrow.
Grace
cloestpuritan:
I think that this is an important part of the gender discussion that probably doesn’t get enough focus.
I think it’s important to distinguish between the general desire to perform homosocial behaviour and the specific things that constitute that behaviour. For example, as someone who identified as a girl, there would have been the general desire to play with the toys that other girls played with; however this should be seen as distinct from the desire to play with those specific toys (e.g. dolls).
Looking at the spectrum from physical to behaviour traits that are related to gender I see the follow broad categories:
1) Primary & secondary sex characteristics (“physical sex”).
2) Perception of, and sexual attraction to primary & secondary sex characteristics (“sexuality”).
3) Behaviour about having and emphasising one’s own sex characteristics and attracting those with the desired sex characteristics who also desire one’s own sex characteristics (“sexual behaviour”).
4) Homosocial behaviour focused on learning above behaviours, competitiveness against those with the same sex characteristics, and establishing a peaking order within that group (“homosocialising”).
5) Gendered behavioural traits that are unrelated to sex (“gendered behaviours/gender roles”).
Firstly, each of these are broad categories, so an individual would have some combination of attributes within each category that isn’t consistently male or female. The attributes of an individual may not be indicative of there attributes in another, however I would assume that there would be two dominate “male” and “female” trends. While there are trends, different people probably have different methods and thresholds for identifying things as one gender or the other.
Another thing to note is that all of these categories, even the later ones, are going to be driven to some extent by biology, while the specifics in each category are going to be significantly influenced by culture. So I think the phrase “gender is a social construct” should be extended to be “gender is a social construct built on a foundation of biology“.
Looking at the ways individuals with uncommon interactions of these categories, some gender issues become evident. For example an uncommon combination between the first two is where someone is attracted people with the same sex characteristics as themselves (i.e. homosexuality). An uncommon combination with the fifth, could result in an effeminate man, or a masculine woman, who otherwise doesn’t have any sort of gender identity concern.
When it comes to trans people, an uncommon combination of the first and the third, would result in someone with one set of physical sex characteristics but the expectation to have and use the opposite (i.e dysphoria). While an uncommon combination of the first/second/third and the fourth could result in someone who is a straight female comfortable with their body, but feels they ought to be part of the male group and treated as a male in social situations (or vice versa).
However, there’s a conflict that arises from the fact that homosocialibilty, as a social behaviour, isn’t unilateral. This means that the behaviour is based on both how an individual identifies their gender as well as how others identify the individual’s gender. If there is a conflict between these two, then there will be a conflict over whether that individual should be treated as part of the homosocial group. If we’re going to consider a person’s gender as something that ought to be respected, and include the nature of a person’s relationships as a fundamental aspect to their gender, then I think we have to consider that feelings on both sides of that relationship need to be respected.
Grace:
I think this answered Gbdub’s question. However, it doesn’t seem to describe anything more than being accepted as part of a culture or nationality, yet people seem to talk about gender as if it is something more fundamental. From your point of view, do you consider there’s something more substantive than a pattern of behaviour binding the gender groups together?
Christopher and Grace:
As a sci fi/physiology matter, I’ve read that human thinking is necessarily corporal thinking. A brain receiving signals from the five senses, but separated from visceral stimuli, would function quite differently from how our brains work in our bodies.
More to the point:
Grace offers an example of how a distraught woman behaved differently toward Grace now she perceives Grace as a woman than when she perceived Grace as a man (e.g., hugging Grace, standing closer). But I was expecting/hoping Grace would talk about not only how, post-transition, the woman behaved differently toward Grace, but if and how Grace now behaves differently toward others, or even when alone.
That is, I suspect that people socialized as women learn to think and act differently than people socialized as men, and that trans people become acutely aware of these differences as they adopt a new social role. For example, imagine you need to turn sideways to squeeze past a crowd and the wall at a party. Men tend to turn so that they face the people they are passing; women tend to turn so that they face the wall. I suspect there are a million of these little distinctions.
Thus, to respond to Christopher’s hypothetical, a brain socialized as a woman might well behave differently than a brain socialized as a man, even if both brains were uploaded to a computer. To take a stereotypical example, the male brain might tend to adopt more aggressive behavior than the female brain.
Then again, maybe that aggression is purely a function of testosterone, and in the absence of that hormone the male and female brains would tend toward equivalent levels of aggression, regardless of socialization.
But I’m just spitballing here. I’m curious what it means for a trans woman to identify as female (e.g., did she identify with specific types of female archetypes, or was the identify more generalized?) Perhaps one manifestation of this identification is that, from childhood, trans women adopt the social norms of women, and thus they have little difficulty conforming to these norms post-transition. Who knows?
Well, Grace and Rimonim might.
On group “identity,” here’s Gbdub and Grace:
Similar to others here, I try to avoid contesting the manner in which anyone chooses to present herself, and I have little patience for mindless “stick to the status quo” pigeonholing. If it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg….
But I sense some people think that certain claims of identity do pick their pockets if those claims are “inauthentic.” Some who suffer for their identity will seek solace and strength in solidarity with others who experience similar suffering. (Say that ten times fast.) During this period of suffering,
These people may reject membership claims by those who have not shared in the struggle – both because they regard membership as a badge of honor that Johnnys-come-lately have not earned, and because admitting outsiders may reduce the sense of intimacy and comradery among the longtime members. I sense this dynamic underlies the reluctance of some feminists to accept trans women, and the reluctance of some black people to accepting Rachel Dolezal.
Phil:
I think this is the clearest and kindest articulation of a desire for objective trans criteria I have seen. You acknowledge that it’s your problem, and something to work on in yourself, and you explain the life experience which leads you to value evidence over everything else.
Let me follow your example and explain a bit about myself. I’m agnostic. I’m a scientist by training and inclination (at one point I thought I was going to be a physicist). I don’t use my scientific training much in my profession, but it influences how I approach everything. I have no objection to unprovable beliefs (I go to church with many people who have unprovable beliefs), as long as people don’t use them to try to justify policy decisions. Where the rubber meets the road is when people say, “I get to treat this other person badly because my unprovable beliefs say that it’s right to do so.”
So I’ve wrestled with the same questions: how do you know? What does that even mean? Except that I had the advantage of having the experience driving my inquiry, so that the questions were personally urgent, and so that sometimes I could test a theory against my experience to see if it fit.
Sure. It’s not a scientific definition, and it’s not intended to be. It’s a practical guideline masquerading as a definition. :)
I actually have a grand unifying theory of gender in humans, and I may attempt to describe it later… but vast portions of it are not testable, and many of the theoretically testable portions can’t be tested ethically. So it won’t satisfy your criterion; at bottom it’s just me, talking about my well-informed guesses.
However, the fact that something cannot be proven does not mean that it does not exist in objective reality. For instance, suppose you are alone in a remote location, isolated from any but the simplest medical care. You are bathing, one day, and you find a lump on your head. I think you would agree that there is a reason for the lump, and that whatever the reason is, it is objectively real. Maybe it’s cancer. Maybe it’s a bot fly larva. There are many things it could be, and without the ability to investigate effectively, only time will tell. (Which sucks for you, because your best course of action now depends heavily on what it actually is.)
So, you do not know what it is, but you know it’s there.
Suppose you have a dog with you, and you find a lump on the dog as you’re grooming it. Now you can see the lump. But unless you’re sure it’s worth the effort and the pain, you probably won’t cut the dog open just to find out what the lump is, without first being pretty sure that it’s necessary to save the dog’s life.
Now suppose you see an insect with a lump. You might capture and kill it just to see what the lump is. Or you might not. But many people would not regard such an act as unethical.
Now suppose you have killed a small animal for food. As you butcher it, you find a lump. Probably without hesitation, you cut it out and cut it open, to see if you can determine what it is. There is no practical or ethical bar.
Similarly, in celestial mechanics, physicists can often infer the existence of mass in a given place by the behavior of things near enough to that mass for their motion to be affected by it. By itself, that says nothing about the nature of the mass. But it means that the mass is there.
So. We know that there is this large group of humans (around 1 in 500 to 1 in 200 — about 700,000 in the United States alone — a lot of people!) who reject the category assignment they were given at birth. In doing so, they have to eat a lot of negative consequences. Our societies are not kind to such people. So we have to ask: why do they do it?
We can theorize that there is a factor which we cannot see, to which the rational, adaptive response is to assert membership in a category which the first, easiest evidence — exterior visual examination — would suggest that they don’t belong in.
What is that factor? We don’t know, and probably there is no single factor which explains all trans people. There are many, many ways to be human, to have a human body.
But, despite the fact that there’s no money in it, people are starting to try to figure out what causes trans people. (Which is a bad way to ask the question, but I’ll leave that for now.) And the results are starting to pile up. The best page collecting them is curated by Zoe Brain, herself a scientist, and trans, and intersex:
http://aebrain.blogspot.com/p/transsexual-and-intersex-gender-identity.html
I don’t need to reproduce them here. To summarize: There exist some structures in the human brain which differ, statistically, between cissexual men and women. When studied in transsexual people, even before hormone therapy, these structures tend to resemble the trans people’s gender of identification, not gender of assignment, or in some cases merely to fall outside of the usual distribution of the gender of assignment.
In other words, though we don’t even begin to understand it fully, there is evidence, and it’s piling up, that transsexuality and cissexuality arise out of observable physical traits in the human brain, which in most people (those we call cissexual) occur together with certain characteristic observable physical traits in the rest of the human body, and that when the traits in the brain occur in a body with traits more typical of the other sex, what you have is a transsexual person.
(For now, I’m glossing over the problems inherent in the phrase “the other sex”.)
How does this help you, Phil? Practically speaking, until we have a remote fMRI-and-etc machine which you can point at people whom you meet, it doesn’t (and that would have its issues, too). Which is why I handed you the practical definition: go with what people say about themselves. As long as trans people continue to take it on the chin for being trans, it’s very unlikely that someone who says “I’m trans” is faking it. Not impossible, but very unlikely.
But, knowing what you know after reading through all those medical abstracts, your gut may feel a lot more comfortable with the notion that there are lumps in cis and trans people which, if we could ethically take them out and examine them, would tell us whether the people they came from are neurologically women or men, and that absent the ability to biopsy the lumps, the next best diagnostic is simply to ask.
Does that help at at all? Does it answer your question?
Grace
desipis:
I think it’s complex and variable, but ultimately, yes, I do. When you write…
…that you’re in the right ballpark. It’s pretty clear to me that gender as a social phenomenon and sex as a physical phenomenon are intertwined. If you read Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow, you see pretty quickly that there are species in which there are two sexes (as defined by the types of gametes they produce), but multiple distinct expressions of “gender” within one or more of the sexes.
The problems generally arise from applying generalizations to individuals. “Oh, you’re a woman, and therefore I know the following things about you…” is a statement where you might make a lot of money placing even-money bets, but where, sooner or later, you will lose bets.
In other words, the way people experience and express gender is shaped to some extent by biology, but it is not determined by it; there is correlation, but not certainty; there is causation, but it is complex, multivariable, and multidirectional.
I sympathize with why some feminists want to reject a biological aspect of gender, because the assertion that gender has a biological basis was weaponized and used to justify limiting women in many, many ways. But it’s pretty clear from the evidence that for many human beings — probably most, certainly not all — gender arose in them from something other than socialization. Exhibit A could be the case of David Reimer.
Grace
I reject biological aspects of gender based on my lived experience. Granted, my experience may not reflect the wider reality but it’s all I’ve got to go on in my daily life.
My own thinking on gender is very different than where the discussion has gone so far. I rarely, if ever, think of myself as a man, although everybody knows that’s what I am. I don’t think of myself as a woman, either. I think of myself as “Jake Squid”. To riff of of Colbert, I don’t see gender. People tell me I’m a man and I believe them because I’ve never been negged.
Whatever differences there are in the ways I treat men and women and the ways that I see men and women as people, that’s buried so deep in my subconscious that I’m unable to identify them.
What I do know is that I see gender as a performance of cultural standards rather than as something determined by biology. I do understand why cultural gender standards lead to the desire for physical modification – appearance is a large part of gender standards and we all want acceptance from our peers and we all modify our physical appearance. I also understand that we’re all inclined to be more comfortable with with one or the other of the genders in any given specific area of gender performance. But that action/activity/performance is only gendered because we’ve determined that that action/activity/performance is what men do or what women do. So I seem to be coming to this conversation from a different starting point than the commentary so far.
If somebody tells me they’re a man, they’re a man. It works for me and, until very recently, I had trouble understanding why that doesn’t work for everybody, so this thread has been enlightening. I look forward to future comments and I want to thank Grace and Rimonim for taking the time and energy to engage on a topic of such deep and personal impact. I also want to thank the other commenters for being willing and able to have this conversation.
nobody.really:
In this context, happily.
First, note from my previous example: I touched the distraught woman on the arm in a way that I would not have, presenting as a man; a gentle stroke and pat on the upper arm. From another woman, that’s 99% likely to be sympathy and comfort, but from a man, that’s likely to be creepy and/or condescending, and so pre-transition I didn’t risk it. But in this case I did it without thinking about it, except after the fact. It flowed out naturally, and was received naturally.
I’m still an introvert, but I’m more socially outgoing, now (this has been tempered by negative experiences at work, where I am now far more guarded with my coworkers, and one in particular, but that’s a special case to set aside).
I move differently, including by myself. I dance very differently. It’s as though my hips have social license to be themselves. It’s not that I’m slinging them around everywhere, it’s just that now I don’t have to limit their motion in order to make sure that I’m walking in a masculine manner. It’s also true of movement generally, but it’s probably most noticeable in the hips. Once I was presenting as myself, I kept discovering little habitual movements which I had learned to perform, over the years, but which were plainly grafted on, in some way uncomfortable. Gradually, over time, I let them go, a process I referred to among friends as “sloughing off the armor”.
These physical changes have cascade effects: I still check in with my chiropractor, but I used to bring him emergencies routinely, and now I can’t remember the last time I had a sudden, acute spinal pain.
I put your question to Lioness, my wife, and she answered, in part:
For me, it’s as though I’ve sloughed off the armor and disassembled the bunker. I’m interacting with the world in more of a full-contact way, with my senses opened up more. Naturally, that means sometimes I get scrapes and bruises where I wouldn’t have, wearing the armor. But it also means the armor doesn’t chafe, or hold the sweaty padding against by body. I can move better, but when I experience a sudden stress I can’t suddenly put the armor back on and re-build the bunker, so I just have to live through it.
But on balance it’s a far, far better way to live.
—–
You mention socialization and speculate a bit about it. Socialization is another thing which gets used against trans women, as a justification for rejecting them from women’s spaces: “You were socialized as a man, and so we’re not going to let you bring your male privilege and entitlement in here.” And like most arguments based in stereotype, that argument is fundamentally incorrect in important ways, but at the same time not 100% wrong. While there is no question that I used to benefit from male privilege, and continue to reap some of those benefits now, I also knew for a fact that I did not receive the socialization which the men I interacted with apparently received. I finally figured out one way to explain it.
“Socialization”, of course, is not monolithic. We are all socialized continuously and differently, in many different ways. One way to categorize socialization is to divide it into active and passive socialization.
Active socialization is the direct feedback which you receive, as an individual. “Keep your knees together when you sit.” “You sissy! You’re throwing like a girl!” “It’s okay, sweetheart, math is hard.” “Well, you’re a boy, so you’re better at spacial tasks.” “You know, you’re acting kinda bitchy.” “Sweet, dawg! You schooled him!” “Mary, put your hand down. Yes, James? You have something to say?”
Passive socialization is what we take in from the environment around us. Sexy women on billboards sell all kinds of products. 99.9% of the people wearing dresses around you are women. Rugged people on billboards are 99% male. Telemarketers asking a child who answers the phone if their father is home, because the telemarketer wants to talk to the one who makes decisions. When you see someone changing a tire, it’s almost always a man, even if it was a woman driving by herself when the tire went flat. (A trans woman I know who was accustomed to changing her own tires, as one does, got a flat shortly after she transitioned. She had just gotten the jack out and was putting it under the car when a car pulled in behind her. Four men got out, said something like, “Here, we’ll help with that,” jacked the car up, changed the tire, tightened the lug nuts, lowered the car, stowed the jack, tire-iron and flat tire, said, “There y’go!” and hopped in their car and drove away. She said almost nothing during the process, except “Thank you,” and as she watched in bemusement as they drove off, she thought to herself, “Huh. Well, that’s new.”)
These are all examples, and we could all give counterexamples. My feminist mother loves to tell the story of what I said at age 5. She was raising me by herself, and so whenever something needed doing in or around the house, she did it. One day, I saw our neighbor, John, working in his yard. I said, “What’s John doing?” She said, “He’s building a fence.” And I said, “Daddies don’t build fences! Mommies build fences!”
So trans girls, on average, get an active socialization intended for boys, with all of its advantages and disadvantages. But we get the same passive socialization that all girls get. Do we absorb the same message that the bikini-ready body on the billboard is what we’re supposed to have, and that we’re lesser if we don’t have it? You bet we do.
For trans boys, it’s the reverse.
So I didn’t get a cis boy’s socialization. I got a trans girl’s socialization.
And even by phrasing it that way I’ve managed to disenfranchise trans girls like Jazz Jennings, who transitioned as soon as she could talk. From that moment, she essentially got a cis girl’s socialization, (except for the bits where people act like dipshits when they discover that she’s trans).
So, while we’re on the topic of applying generalizations to individuals, let’s remember that generalizing about boy’s socializations and girl’s socializations is all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Which brings us back, again, to Myca’s point about ideologies and human beings.
nobody.really:
Yes, that dynamic is certainly part of that rejection. For some trans women, there’s a process of “Holy shit! I had NO IDEA!” which women (trans and cis, both) who already had a clue have a hard time finding lovable.
Part of the problem with applying that dynamic is that sooner or later you have to decide when someone has suffered enough to be welcome in your clubhouse. And, like nature/nurture, there’s an element of legitimacy in the question… but it’s very easy to put a foot wrong without even knowing it.
Also, I note with a certain wry amusement that the poem you quoted is a song in my church’s hymnal. :)
Grace
Grace:
Odd you would say this: The only trans person I have occasion to speak with face-to-face is a friend’s kid. The kid presented as a boy who was handsome, intelligent, but inexplicably introverted and awkward. Insisted on having his own tent when camping. Eventually refused to go camping. By senior year he barely left the house. And other boys seemed to pick on him. Not good at sports, I guessed?
He slouched off to college – never to be seen again. In his place returned this astonishing poised and self-confident young woman. It’s like someone threw a switch. She seems so comfortable in her own skin; it’s wonderful to see. Her parents quaked to tell anyone, wondering which family member should be told first. She mailed out announcements. Done and done.
Having graduated, she applied for high-quality jobs. When they did not come through, she simply shrugged off her parents’ suggestions to lower her sights. And lo, her patience has been rewarded. Done and done.
She went solo to find an apartment in the trendy part of town. Done and done.
And she is more than happy to discuss the politics and theory of gender and transitioning – with anyone. On any occasion. At length. Done – though never quite done.
(I see her regularly. The nature of our relationship precludes me from asking some of the questions I’ve asked here. But her love of discussing transitioning has provided me with ample opportunities to open the door for her to volunteer some personal experiences and perspectives. And she is simply thrilled to ignore that door and discuss more gender theory. So glad I asked.
New grads – go figure.)
So, I can speak a bit to the culture and acculturation stuff.
I have gender-related issues, but they’re pretty much cultural (i.e. I do not like what my society expects me to do, or allows other to do to me, based on my gender.) I don’t have a strong attachment to my physical body as “right” or “wrong,” so it’s mostly just the cultural stuff.
I have also lived long-term in another culture. Doing that, it was much easier to do my gender in an acceptable way, both because the cultural expectations for my gender were something I was more comfortable with / better at, and because as a foreigner I was given a lot of leeway about my gender performance. That was better. I had a lot less frustration and discontent in my daily life (re: gender, anyway).
This is echoing a lot of what Sarah said, but displacement in culture rather than in time also works.
I am also pretty obsessed with cross-cultural and historical gender expression, because it’s a thing that varies a lot over culture and history. As far as I can tell, pretty much every society thus far has a gender system, with at least two of the genders based on sex. But also, almost every society has people that subvert and avoid the gender system, and often the society has specific roles for those people (although those roles may not be desirable.) So, basically, I’m trying to say that there are gender roles everywhere and everywhen, but there are also a fair number of people who cross those gender roles or reject them entirely.
Our society is currently going through a huge shake-up of its gender system, not just with binary trans people but also with genderqueer people, genderfluid people, agender people, feminism fighting against gender roles and inventing new ones, reactionaries inventing new and stricter gender roles, and whatever the heck is going on on tumblr. I don’t think we know what the end state is going to be. But it’s definitely going to be different than what it was before.
I agree with Grace, and I think those disagreeing with Grace should spend more time checking their privilege and less time telling a trans woman she’s wrong about gender issues.
Regarding the male vs. female socialization thing, a couple of posts from A Feminist Challenging Transphobia may be of interest:
Understanding Gender Socialization a Little Better:
If Gender Isn’t a Binary, We’re All Both Oppressed and Oppressor
Huh. And I’ve learned something new. I haven’t come across the term “agender” before so I had to look it up. Now I have a label for how I think about (my) gender. Thanks for that!
nobody.really, over in the open thread:
There is that risk, certainly, but so far that has not happened. My participation has been effortful, but not caustic or shredding. In part, this is because interrogating our ideas around gender is the purpose of the place, and so it’s not like I’m getting blindsided. But mainly, it’s because everyone has been very careful to keep the discussion as civil and kind as possible, which I really appreciate.
And thanks for the kudos. :)
Tamme:
Thank you for the support, Tamme. I actually haven’t seen almost anything so far which I would call disagreement. No doubt there will be, but when it comes, I won’t regard it as bad per se, but only insofar as it detracts from the high quality of the conversation.
Also, while I think that trans women and men definitely have valuable things to say about gender, we’re not the only ones with a gender identity (I think most people have one, thought not all). So I’m leery of an appeal to authority. If a trans person makes an assertion, it’s okay to see if it stands up under scrutiny. I’m perfectly capable of mistake and misunderstanding, and so is every other human being.
Lee:
You don’t say which, but I just thought I’d mention that I’m curious, in case you could be persuaded to say. :)
closetpuritan:
Those are good links. From your first one, let me also excerpt:
This was true for me, in grade school. By high school, I had managed to figure things out well enough that people largely stopped bullying me, and no one attempted sexual assault. I carry the scars to this day, though.
It might have something to do with the fact that some of my gradeschool years were in an all-boy (apparently) environment, while in high school it was about 50-50. In an all-boy environment, a trans girl may find herself pretty completely on her own, a thought which reminds me of something written by little light, which Amp has linked to before.
—–
I’m really enjoying hearing people say that they’re learning things from this discussion. That’s what I hoped for, and I think Rimonim, too. (He warned me that his time would be limited, at first, but I’m sure he’ll chime in at some point. He’s a thoughtful and articulate fellow, I’m very curious to see how he responds to some of this discussion, and maybe answers some of the questions. Got my fingers crossed.)
Grace
@Grace: It’s not an “appeal to authority” so much as a call to respect the experiences of people who have dealt with crushing oppression. We can have a definition of gender which reflects the feelings and experiences of the oppressed, or a definition which reflects the feelings and experiences of the privileged. I know which one sounds better to me.
I love mint, too.
I just attended a wonderful talk by two trans elders, Kate Bornstein and Sandy Stone. Like me, both of them grew up in a time when any kind of queerness was either criminalized or discouraged with random violence that Law enforcement essentially ignored.
Kate posed a brain-teaser to challenge the Keith Ablow(hard)s of the nattering media s***stream; if a child declares, happily, their gender identity to be different than the one associated with their birth sex, and grows up with none of the secondary gender characteristics of let’s say,a male, and at age eighteen appears to virtually everyone as female due to cues such as breast tissue, voice, etc. are they still “male”?
I think it’s pretty obvious they aren’t. What becomes obvious at that point is the culture’s investment in an enforceable binary structure for gender.
I don’t have time to expand that, right now: I’ll just throw the bomb and leave.
Thanks for setting this up! Lots of food for thought! I am mostly in the Jake Squid camp on gender. It is not a strong part of my identity–I never minded being mistaken for a boy, even as a kid. Nor did I mind being accepted as a girl. I guess I never really felt one way or the other, but I am comfortable in my body (which has girl parts).
I tend to like things that are culturally coded male, but also like some things coded female. As a really young kid, I never wanted to wear skirts (still don’t), which led to some quite spectacular tantrums until my Mom gave up on getting me to wear skirts to school for picture day when I was 5. I am lucky that it was pretty easy to be a girl who liked boy things when I was a child, though I have problems with social cues and may have missed attempts at bullying when I was a kid.
It makes perfect sense to me that there might be people who feel their gender much more strongly than I do, since most people seem to. It also makes sense to me that some of those people might not feel the gender that was assigned to them at birth. I knew from a really young age that I didn’t want to wear skirts or dresses, but my discomfort with traditionally female presentation doesn’t extend to my body parts (I am fortunate in that way). I am also completely comfortable with being considered a woman (the default for my body type), though I don’t think of myself as female or male in my head. It would not surprise me at all for gender to be a continuum like sexuality appears to be, with a small minority being (or attracted to) both/all or neither/none.
Personally, it makes the most sense to let people decide who they are, and then treat them as they desire to be treated, since that is what I want for myself. I fail to see how someone else’s self-expression impacts my life in any way unless I am in an intimate relationship with them. I think the increasingly higher profile of transgender people is causing some people to think about how gender constructs apply to themselves for the first time, and it makes some of them uncomfortable. I am hopeful that as tine passes, people will become more accepting of others, as that appears to be the current trend.
JaneDoh:
Yeah, me too.
Grace
RE the “appeal to authority” and “We can have a definition of gender which reflects the feelings and experiences of the oppressed, or a definition which reflects the feelings and experiences of the privileged. ”
Maybe transgender is especially interesting because there is an element of gender that is strictly constructed socially AND an element that is more based in the body and/or feelings about the body.
We have a lot of people deeply invested in defining gender as strictly on or the other of those. Many feminists want to talk about gender as if it was purely a social construct. Transgender doesn’t fit well with that. Many others want to talk about gender as if it is purely biological. Transgender doesn’t fit well with that. But I don’t see any clear reason to believe that gender isn’t both. Maybe it is based in biology AND has huge elements of unnecessary social construction. In the medium run, we hope that there are elements of transgender that transcend oppression, so defining it from oppression/privilege dynamics may not be a great way of going about it.
This idea also softens the critique we’ve seen above which essentially boils down to “how can you feel like you are the wrong ‘gender’ when gender is just a social construct anyway”. The answer is that it isn’t ALL just a social construct, even if lots of the markers of gender are.
Grace, thanks for that link.
Tamme:
We can have a definition of gender which reflects the feelings and experiences of the oppressed, or a definition which reflects the feelings and experiences of the privileged. I know which one sounds better to me.
OK, but not everyone within the oppressed group OR the oppressor group has the same definition of gender. And there’s more than one cis person on here basically saying they’re not sure how to define gender at all.
A definition of gender that reflects the feelings and experiences of everyone would be great, as well as, most likely, the closest to objective reality.
To clarify: If our only choices were the current dominant cis understanding of gender, and the current dominant trans understanding of gender, OK, I pick the trans understanding. But I think the more we learn about the diversity of experiences of gender (including through accounts like Jake Squid and Jane Doh’s), as well as the more we study it scientifically, the better our understanding can get. It doesn’t need to stagnate where it is.
Trans also goes right to a zone where our intellect, emotions and instincts intersect. Gender is primary in procreation and survival of the species and our amygdala is tuned to anything that deviates from it. Our larger brain can get that we, as a species no longer need to rely on sexual reproduction; our options for passing on our name or bloodline are infinite and often irrelevant. Other species might be celebrating this achievement, but our meat brains are slow catching up.
If gender is fluid, then attraction is and mating are fluid, and that challenges the way society has been organized for many hundreds of years by a patriarchal culture that is very much biased favoring the XY side of the chromosome palette.
There have always been humans attracted to other humans with blended “masculine”and “feminine” characteristics, but they have had to find ways to sublimate or hide those desires to survive.
It’s not surprising that people who worship a big Patriarch in the sky as all supreme would be horrified by a “man” (created in You-Know-Who’s) image stepping down(in their eyes) to a mere baby carrier and food preparer with a sexual organ that literally makes her crazy(google “hysteria”).
Less religious men see all of this as a threat to a system that made it easy to push people around and accumulate stuff, as well as taking the shine off of them as the center of attention.
Not sure this was coherent, but I had fun writing it.
Andi Ferguson:
I think the issue with this question is that it frames one’s actual gender as an affinity, like a preference for the color green. If that is all that gender is, then, sure, let’s describe it as such. But I don’t think that’s the experience that most human beings have, whether they’re cis or trans.
If a child says, “I think I’m a girl because I like girl stuff!” Well…I would hope that a good parent would be open to the idea that their child is a girl. But I’m not certain that an expressed affinity for things that are associated with girls is all it takes to be a woman.
I do think good parenting might involve helping children to understand that there aren’t really boy things and girl things. (This reminds me of a post that Amp posted years ago.) But, for example–boys can play with dolls. Girls can have short hair and wear pants. Boys can wear skirts. Girls can grow up to become truck drivers, and boys can be nurses. Etc., etc.
1. Is there anyone who disagrees that raising a child and trying to inculcate an understanding that both men and women can do anything (even though our culture pretends that there are things men and women aren’t supposed to do) is a good thing?
2. If we assume that gender identity for a trans child is something inherent (that is, something that is not constructed culturally or rhetorically), is there a chance that avoiding gendered expressions about boys and girls might make it harder for a trans child to come to a realization about themselves?
In other words, most of the accounts I’ve heard of trans people growing up discuss the ways they felt connected to clothing, symbols, and/or activities related to the opposite gender of what they were assigned. So, if you were a total hippie parent and you raised your kids in a commune and you encouraged your male-bodied children to grow their hair long, wear makeup, wear dresses, etc. (let’s say this is in addition to conventional boy behaviors)– do you think that would have a net positive effect on all children? Or would you run the risk of confusing trans children?
(I understand, of course, that it’s impossible to raise children in a vacuum, and that children will likely get messages from the culture at large, etc. etc.)
Grace:
Fair point. And it’s a pretty good guideline.
I think you’re actually being more careful in your response than even I would expect. I certainly think it’s possible to believe in something that is not directly testable, if there’s a good reason to believe in it. Nor is it necessary to fully understand the underpinnings of every phenomenon in order to have a general idea that the phenomenon is real.
I will probably never understand the theoretical one-dimensional objects called strings in physics, but I accept that credible sources are developing theories about how strings interact, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, either.
Perhaps a reasonable definition of “man” would combine the group identity ideas presented earlier and sound something like: “A man is a person whose brain tells him he belongs to the group ‘men’ in the human species.” I’m fairly confident that our understanding of this will grow in the future, but it doesn’t feel like that definition is going of any unwarranted speculative ledges.
I mean, I guess that definition still includes the word in its definition, but I feel like saying “A man is a person whose brain tells him he does not belong to the group including ‘women’ in the human species,” but that would leave out people who believe their gender is non-binary, or who are agendered, etc.
(It is also possible that maleness and femaleness are innate qualities and that being non-binary or agendered are a different type of phenomenon, but I will default to the idea that we should refer to people the way they want to be referred to.)
I feel like this has been a really useful discussion.
Sebastian H seems spot on when they said:
Tamme writes:
Tamme, I realize that this statement comes from a place of respect, but the problem I have with it is the implication that we can just arbitrarily choose a definition of gender, whether it’s real or not, based not on objective reality but on the feelings of people who have been oppressed. I don’t think this is what you meant, but taking that stance feels–to me–to be patronizing toward the people you’re trying to respect.
One problem I think that trans people and others may face is that their legitimate identities are (and will likely continue to be) conflated with woo-woo bullshit. This will be done by opponents or gender essentialists, sure, but it is also done by allies. (We have a tendency to lump dissimilar things together in our LGBTQIA community.) I doubt very much that “genderqueer” exists in objective reality in the same way that a trans woman’s identity does, but any decent guidebook for dealing with LGBTQIA issues is going to err on the side of being more inclusive, rather than cherry-picking only stuff that doesn’t involve magical thinking.
And that may be the polite thing to do. But as other types of identities get lumped in with being trans–things like transracial identities, “otherkin,” transpecies, etc., I do think there is value to making distinctions between things that exist in reality and everything else.
Also, feng shui is still bullshit. :)
Try this hypothesis on for size:
People vary with respect to many variables – generally continuous variables. Societies learn to attach significance to certain types of variance, often coming to treat continuums as binary categories even when these binary categories reflect a weak model of the underlying reality. But moreover, society prescribes archetypes – that is, a familiar combination of points on many continuums.
We’re all “queer” in the sense that no one perfectly coincides with the expectations of the social role we have been assigned. Most of us hide our non-conformities sufficiently well as to avoid triggering excessive concern in others (or in ourselves). But some don’t.
Some people socialized to play the role of Conan the Barbarian realize that they authentically gravitate to the role of Dali Lama. This may lead us to publicly break from the role people expect us to play, and to assume a role we feel authentically called to play. Society has developed scripts for describing some of the more familiar social transitions. (e.g., “Drug lord finds Jesus, seeks to persuade fellow gang members to repent.” “Walter White, nebbish schoolteacher, revealed to be the notorious ‘Heisenberg.’) Generally these scripts involve a denial of continuity (and often public repentance), but not always. (e.g., C.S. Lewis, longtime atheist, alleges he had always authentically felt called to theism, but had been socialized to deny it until he could suppress it no longer.)
So we’re all queer, and some of us even make public transitions between social roles. “Trans” folk just happen to identify with, and transition to, a social role located on the opposite side of an arbitrary gender divide. And “genderqueer” folk reject their socially-prescribed gender role, but decline to identify with any other archetype. While Western society has grown more accepting of people crossing some social barriers (e.g., between upper- and lower-class), acceptance of transition across the gender divide has lagged (Due to the role of sex in reproduction? Due to the anxiety and frustration people feel in realizing that the object of their sexual attraction might not reciprocate?). Society is still in the process of developing scripts to describe these transitions.
Janedoh, my situation’s close to yours. I was musing about the question (did Grace pose it?) of how I would feel if someone told me I had to live as the opposite gender, and realized I’m not particularly bugged by the idea of being addressed as male. (For reference, I’m a bisexual cis woman, with a build no one would ever mistake for male.) I like my body the way it is. I like the things I like. What others think about my likes or me, I don’t care so much, if they want to think I’m ‘male’, okay, whatever. What bothers me is when people make assumptions about me or my likes based on some arbitrary definition of ‘female’.
When I was a kid, I hated being mistaken for a boy, but it was all about the assumptions of what boys and girls could do. I hated assumptions that I liked or disliked certain things because I was a girl even more. Now my haircut is fairly masculine, but I’m generally more amused than annoyed when it causes someone to think I’m male. I like blowing up assumptions – never met a stereotype I fit. The most egregrious lately has been two recent assumptions that money I’m spending must belong to my husband. Shoot it down, move on.
So what I feel in reaction to transfolk who choose to strongly take on gender signifiers is complicated (and I want to point out here that *it doesn’t matter what I feel*)… and I’d love to discuss it… and I apologize for not having read this whole thread yet…
Because I have no desire to use gender signifiers to identify or be identified, I have mixed feelings about trans people using them. I think trans people using them has the potential to reinforce these strong notions of gender roles, and I clearly don’t want them used to type *me*.
Let me be clear that I’m totally supportive of trans folk representing themselves as they choose, and of anyone doing that, really. I have trans and cis femme friends who look fabulous and I have no problem telling them so. Caitlyn Jenner’s dress is great, she looks lovely, and I’m happy she’s happy. Since I am sometimes told I’m not what I should be, I truly support and am glad whenever trans folk can be who they are.
But does Jenner feel she must do the makeup/dress/long hair thing to be ‘female’? Does that mean that if I hate the makeup/dress/long hair thing I’m not ‘female’? And if I’m not, it’s not so much that I give a shit about the concept of ‘female’, it’s that I get annoyed when someone tries to push their assumptions of what I am, or should be, on me. I’m worried about reinforcing this concept of ‘female’ because I don’t want it forced on me.
I personally feel like I don’t understand the significance of biological gender, probably because I’m cis, but I can also say that the idea of having a penis and no boobs or hips doesn’t bother me. The idea of switching genders strikes me as learning another ‘code switch’. Society makes assumptions now; it would make different assumptions if I had a penis and no boobs or hips. Both sets would be full of Wrong. Both sets are something that one learns to navigate; they both have their difficulties and advantages. Do I sound like one of those people who claims to be color blind? Cause I feel like it’s not that so much, it’s having learned to code switch between ‘male’ and ‘female’ – which may be as much about being a tomboy and female computer geek as anything.
Not only am I bi, but I grew up with a remarkably non-sexist upbringing. Sure, I felt the effects of sexim in the world, but in my family these were always seen as the bullshit they were, and I was encouraged to be myself, whatever that might be. Add being bisexual to that and I have a pretty a-gendered view of myself; when I think about gender it’s in relation to feminism. So I guess I want to ask y’all: is it just me, or do other cis people say things like I have above? Am I being naive? Someone wanna pose me some more questions that could rock my ideal little internal world?
Phil:
I have never heard of a child saying this. Not saying it couldn’t happen, but when parents talk about how their children told them they were trans, it’s in language like this: “I a girl, Mommy,” or “Mom, Dad, I’m a girl.”
She’s not a girl because she likes girl stuff. She’s a girl because she’s a girl. If she were an amalgam of statistically average girls, she’d like girl stuff because she’s a girl. But as she is an individual whose traits are not actually determined by the predilections of the average person in the category to which she belongs… she likes girl stuff because she likes girl stuff.
(I have now written and re-read “girl” so many times in a row that for a moment that character string seemed weird and uncertain to me. I actually had to check the spelling against what Phil wrote.)
That’s circular, of course. Think of it is poetry for “she likes girl stuff for reasons arising from factors too complex or unknowable to discover”.
This discussion has clarified something for me.
I have a newsfeed for trans-related stories. I don’t have the time to read them all, nor the patience for the rampant transphobia which fills a lot of reporting about trans people, so I run it all through a Bayesian filter system. I read the stuff at the top, delete the stuff at the bottom, and make occasional forays into the stuff in the middle.
There are a lot of profiles of trans people out there. A lot. And they get repetitive. In fairness to the hapless writers, there are only so many ways to tell that story. Some are better than others. All but the very best follow a tight script. Sometimes the order of events is arranged artfully (or, more often, inartfully) for The Big Reveal, but there are certain essential touchstones.
One of these is the part where the narrator explains to the audience that the subject of the story is trans and Enumerates The Signs. The Signs and The Contrasts. The Signs are the things which show that the subject is trans; if the subject is a trans woman, then as a girl she wanted to wear princess dresses, for instance, or have long hair. The Contrasts are the things which make it such a total shocker that the person is trans, because she did macho, manly, masculine things, like fly fighter jets, for instance, or train with the local SWAT team.
It’s now clear to me that these are another attempt to define by appearance. Our first attempt is genital configuration, but trans people insist that that’s not reliable, so then we have to look for something else, so we touch on secondary sex characteristics, like facial hair, but then trans people insist that that’s unreliable, so we have to look for something else, so we look at behavior and social role activity. Sure, this person was born with a penis and assigned male, but look, they wear eyeliner, and arrange flowers in their spare time, and like to do all these feminine-coded things, and so they’re trans! Or that’s okay because they’re trans!
No.
They’re trans because they were assigned a gender other than the one they are. You know what gender they are when they tell you.
One problem with the behavior/clothing/pastimes model is that it leaves no room for cisgender men who have feminine-coded behavior/clothing/pastimes, and it leaves no room for cisgender women who have masculine-coded behavior/clothing/pastimes.
Anyone here grow up on Free to Be, You and Me? Remember the poem Dick Cavett read?
JaneDoh writes
and then by way of explanation says
She lays it out efficiently: she did not care if people saw her as a boy or a girl, and she in comfortable in her body, which is physiologically female-typical.
Then she expands her examination: she likes male-coded and female-coded things, and dislikes skirts, which caused no problems after her mother conceded the argument. (This may not be quite as neutral as it seems; consider what might have happened if she had a male-tyical body and disliked pants. Her mother may in fact be awesome, but many mothers in our society won’t concede that argument as readily as JaneDoh’s mother conceded that argument.)
JaneDoh, you stop there, and I’m not disagreeing with anything you’ve said in reporting your own experience. But it struck me that after not caring how people perceived you, your next step was to behaviors and clothing. When I replied “me too”, I wasn’t being flippant — I was trying to gently point out that my behaviors and clothing don’t define my gender, either, even though I’m female, and have walked a trans path. Nor do they arise from my being female, or having walked a trans path. I could point out a raft of masculine behaviors, including some which code super-masculine, and a raft of feminine behaviors. But the behaviors are beside the point. I like going to the range and shooting holes in paper. I also know that I’m a woman when I do it, and when other people see me do it, I want them to see a woman and treat me like one. (Which, in the case of going to the range, may mean that they treat me with surprise, condescension, or confusion. It’s not that I want them to be surprised, condescending or confused. It’s that I want them to get to their surprise, condescension and confusion on a path which goes through “oh, look, there’s a woman putting holes in paper targets”.
I know I’m a woman, and I want people to treat me like one. If I’m building a house, I’m a woman building a house. If I’m wearing a dress, I’m a woman wearing a dress. If I have long hair, I’m a woman with long hair. If I’m out for a run, I’m a woman out for a run. If I’m hitting the heavy bag, I’m a woman hitting the heavy bag.
I could run around telling everyone this, but, y’know, the cashier doesn’t have time; she’s just trying to finish the transaction and get on to the next customer. And no one is going to believe me if their senses tell them something different because I look and sound like a man. So I help them to the right conclusion by looking and sounding like a woman, so that we don’t all have to stop our lives while they read this discussion thread and think about it. And we’re all that much happier, especially the people who assume I’m cis and motor onward.
Phil:
Yes. It happened to me.
The standard narrative is “I knew I was a boy [or girl] when I was five.” First it was the standard narrative because it was the hurdle we were required to clear before doctors would give us hormones or surgery. Then it was the standard narrative to court legitimacy in the hearts and minds of other people.
But it’s not my narrative. I knew I was different early on, but that’s true of many cis people, too. I didn’t figure out that I was actually a different gender as opposed to not normatively male until I was around nineteen or twenty. Part of the reason is that I was permitted to express myself as a non-normative boy.
I was raised in a soup of gendered assumptions, like all of us, but my Mom fought hard against it. Free To Be, modelling doing anything she wanted to do, pointing out and calling out sexist assumptions, and so on. (She did a good job, but it’s like trying to throw back the tide with a bucket. And she had her own blind spots; she knew that girls could do anything boys could, but like many feminists she did not assign as high a value to things feminine. For instance, she never taught me how to cook.) But because I was permitted to do pretty much what I wanted (grow my hair out as far as school rules permitted, for instance, or largely decline to play team sports), I didn’t have much to push against.
To this day, I don’t know how I figured it out. I don’t remember what prompted me to go to the card catalog of the local medical school library and let my fingers do the walking in the “T” section until I hit “transsexual”. But that’s what I did. And what I found (the state of the art was pretty dismal at that time) prompted me to slam the lid down and try as hard as I could to do the “man” thing. I made it almost fourteen years before the lid blew off of that pressure-cooker.
So, yes. It can happen. I don’t think it will happen much, anymore. Somehow while growing up I managed to miss all mention of Christine Jorgensen, Jan Morris, and Renee Richards. It would be almost impossible (outside of certain religious sects) to miss all mention of Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner.
Phil:
Huzzah! :)
annqueue:
The cases aren’t parallel. People make momentary mistakes toward you, but I’m guessing you have many gender cues to draw on to help them correct their course. You mentioned your masculine haircut causes occasional misgenderings, but probably your voice doesn’t, or your quantity of facial hair. And, even if you had several queues working against you, when push comes to shove you have a cultural legitimacy which is ironclad. If, as a cissexual woman, you get kicked out of the women’s room (as happened to Khadijah Farmer when she was kicked out of the Caliente Cab Company in 2008, or just recently to Cortney Bogorad, who was kicked out of Fishbones, in Detroit.), when push comes to shove, you will be able to identify yourself as a woman.
Trans people, and especially many trans women, fight a lot of gender cues which we can’t change (height, hand size, voice). Some of us need to use every tool in the box to be taken for who we are, and when we get kicked out of restrooms, we don’t get an automatic win on the factual fight afterward.
I am trans woman. Hear me roar. :)
I’m sure I speak for at least a few of us when I say that I am flattered at how powerful you perceive us to be, but I promise you that we did not make this gender system. We just have to live in it. When it comes to who’s reinforcing the status quo, I assure you it is not the 1-in-250 who are trans.
No. I’m sure she knows she’s female.
But, being a world-famous Olympian in a men’s event, she has to perform femininity as flawlessly as possible to get other people simply to acknowledge that she’s female.
Also, some women do the femme thing Jenner is doing. A lot of women, actually, and especially women with lots of money. And they get judged on how well they do it, I’m sure, but not the way Jenner does. They don’t get labeled as men or called “Bruce” if they do it poorly.
No. You’re female because you sincerely say that you’re female.
This is the problem I was talking about earlier in this very long comment, about cause and effect. I am not a woman because I like doing some feminine-coded things. I like doing some feminine-coded things because I like doing them. And, if I were a randomly-selected woman, I’d be statistically more likely to do feminine-coded things than a randomly-selected man. But since I’m an individual woman, averages are irrelevant. I like doing the things I like doing, and I’m a woman while doing them, whether I want to be or not. (And I promise you there were times when I did not want to be a woman, because that’s hard, and because that would mean I was transsexual, and that’s hard, but in the end none of that mattered, because I was a woman, like it or not. And I do like it, or at least, the peace which comes with not fighting it anymore. That’s pretty cool. Now the fights are outward, not inward. When I presented as a man, I never used to get marriage proposals from the drunk men I arrested. During my last shift three different drunk men came on to me while I was in uniform doing my job, one of them a zombie playa who just would not stay down. When I was about to search him and asked him if he had on his person any needles or knives or anything which might cut me, he said no, but he had a big dick. That suave devil. Later, after he asked if I was married, four times, and I told him that I was, four times, he asked me to run off to him home state with him.)
I promise you, I get that. I get that so hard! It sucks, and I hate it when people try to confine me like that.
Since you ask, yeah, you kinda do. I’m not saying that you’re wrong; I strongly suspect that there are people out there who could go either way or in between, and maybe you’re one of them. But I seem to hear this sentiment a fair amount from cis folks, and it always reminds me of the straight white male Libertarian on a discussion group, years ago, who assured us all that if he woke up tomorrow as a “black lesbian female” nothing would change.
I beg to differ; I think a lot of things would change for him. But there’s no proving it.
Well, again, I’m not going to say you’re wrong about yourself. Who am I to say that? You’re the best, the only, reporter of your own internal experience. But I think that when the current is taking you to a reasonably comfortable destination downriver, it’s probably easy not to fully appreciate how it might feel if you needed to get upriver. So I think it would be easy for people with strong gender identities not to realize it when how the world treats them more-or-less lines up with those identities.
As to rocking your world, it sounds like maybe trans women have already done that, just by existing and doing what we must to get by.
:)
Grace
nobody.really and Grace Annam (Who both said similar things but this particular quote is from nobody.really)
And if I were writing a scifi story instead of a thought experiment, I would agree with you. :-P
But the purpose of that thought experiment was to try to respond to Grace Annam’s comment about my assigning primacy to the body rather than the mind.
A more nuanced way to put it (although one with less sci-fi glitz) is that my mind is male in the same way that my mind is American.
I’m not a philosopher or even that well read, so any model I make of the mind is going to have problems, but the gist of it is, my mental maleness seems, to me, to be a result of the socialization I got, in that it feels like an outside influence on my deeper self.
I’m not sure of a good way to explain this, but it’s like, I speak English. I do pretty well at it, but it’s a learned behavior. I can say “If I had been born in France I would speak French”, and what I mean by that is that there’s a deeper, more fundamental me, and I can imagine it being intact and largely unchanged even if it had grown up in a different country.
Or I could say, “I learned English” but I don’t think it would be true to say “I learned to be an introvert” or “I learned to be afraid of heights” or “I learned to be heterosexual”. Some of my traits feel* fundamental and others feel learned. My gender feels learned.
*Whether they actually ARE fundamental or learned (Or whether those are even sensible categories in the first place) might be a different story. But I think my subjective sense of self is what we’re talking about.
And so, to maybe go back to my sci-fi thought experiment, if I’m flying around as a spaceship and no longer have any contact with human-kind, I might well stop speaking English. Eventually, over a long enough period of time, I might even stop thinking in English. In the same way, divorced from a male body and a particular social context, I could and frankly would abandon huge chunks of my gender performance, many from the fact that I don’t like them, others just out of forgetfulness and lack of practice.
And when that happened I would no longer be a male in any real sense.
My physical body and the socialization that came from having that particular body in a particular time and place are real things and I don’t want to down-play their influence on my thoughts and behaviors too much. But they feel like a certain kind of thing which feels less integral to me than certain other kinds of things (It’s much harder for me to imagine “unlearning” my heterosexuality or switching to another orientation).
Discovering the word “Agender” felt really weird because my first thought was “Wait, isn’t that how everybody feels?” followed immediately by “No, you doofus, you know for a fact that it isn’t.”
Christopher said:
And I thought this is me.
Grace Annam said:
I went to behavior and appearance, because for me, other than my body, that is all there is. I do not feel like a woman, nor do I feel like a man. I just feel like me. I am not gender-blind, of course. I know that due to social programming pretty much everyone (including me) treats men and women differently because we respond differently subconsciously, and that the same behaviors have different meaning depending on the genders of the people involved. I understand that you want to trigger the responses a woman triggers because you are a woman, regardless of what you wear or what you do, and want to be treated like who you are. I don’t really care what responses I trigger in terms of gender, and behave fairly atypically for a woman at times (I don’t like to touch people or be touched, and I don’t express much emotion) which confuses some people. I’ve also been told that I have ambiguous to male-leaning body language, which may be why I am frequently mistaken for male when I am wearing loose clothing and have short hair.
I have been kicked out of women’s rooms (mostly when I was a teen), but of course this has a completely different meaning and context for me than for a trans person. At a teen, I considered it a good thing–when I was a teen, I really wanted to be male for a while. Not because I felt like a boy/man, but because I wanted the privileges that came with being male. I grew out of this, since that is a crazy reason to make such massive body and life changes, and as I became less of a self-centered teenager I realized that everyone has areas of privilege in their lives, and that I already had more than many.
I find this discussion fascinating, because there are few people with whom I can talk about what gender means to them IRL.
“OK, but not everyone within the oppressed group OR the oppressor group has the same definition of gender.”
I realise that not everybody in the oppressed group agrees, but that only means that any debate that takes place should take place within the oppressed community, and the privileged should avoid weighing in.
It’s like black people arguing about the meaning of the word “nigger”. White people’s perspectives are unhelpful. They should just shut up and wait for the black community to decide, and then listen to their decision.
@Grace: I apologise that I disrespected you. I’ll be withdrawing from the conversation now. I think you are a really brave and courageous and wise person and I the fact that I disrespected you is a failing on my part. I hope with enough self-examination I can ensure that failing doesn’t reccur. Thank you for your criticism, it’s really valuable to me.
I want to make clear that I am in no way saying that. We have a lot of social constructs and there will always be people who feel that they are assigned the wrong role within that social construct. A social construct is a real thing. Christopher gets at that when he writes:
What I was trying to say is that I come to this conversation from a completely different perspective than those who had commented before my first contribution. While I believe that gender is entirely a social construct, I know that I may not be correct. If other people are telling me that they believe that gender is partially, largely or wholly a biological thing I’m not going to say that they’re wrong. The way I deal with gender springs from the way I think about it, whether my starting point is correct or not.
But I am in no way saying that the desire to belong to a gender other than what you were assigned at birth makes no sense because gender is a social construct. In fact, it makes perfect sense to me that there are people who want to change their gender.
As much as this is a conversation about trans experience, I think it is also a conversation so that those of us who aren’t trans can figure out why we feel the way we do about trans people and what that means and whether we have misconceptions that we would like to correct. It’s a conversation to allow us to understand people who make a marginalized and often dangerous decision. Discovering the term “agender” has uncovered the reason that I think differently about gender issues than many others, including Grace, do . I appreciate hearing how others approach the subject and why and how that fits in with how they understand others.
Clarity is nearly as important in this conversation as respect is and I want to apologize for not communicating more effectively.
Hello everybody! Better late then never, eh? Thanks to everyone for this respectful and illuminating discussion. A few thoughts.
Nobody.really way back at 24:
Yes. I don’t know about others folks, but it’s certainly true for me. For example, while I was in the social role of adolescent girl, I could not understand all the girls’ anxieties about being too fat or not pretty enough–I just never absorbed those messages. What I could understand was that it is not okay to cry in front of others, that it’s important to act tough in front of your friends by doing stupid stunts and being able to drink liquor straight, that it’s embarrassing to fight “like a girl” (e.g. scratching) and that I needed to fight “like a boy” (punching, etc).
I definitely tuned into male socialization even though I was putatively a girl. This made it pretty seamless when I later transitioned. I had no confusion whatsoever about how to perform the role of man socially–but I could never get my head around how to perform the role of woman. For myself I’d say my identity is really rooted in just feeling awkward, off, unhealthy, and weird when inhabiting the role woman, and feeling relaxed, confident, healthy, and at my best when inhabiting the role man.
Sebastian H at 40:
This captures my view well. Based on my experience, gender seems to be a true harmony of social construction and underlying biological difference. The two are so intermixed they can never be really disentangled. But we can observe the mixture.
Phil at 44:
So, that describes my childhood. I was a long-haired, barefooted kid in tie-dye, playing in the mud, doing arts and crafts, and growing up amongst a menagerie of somewhat exotic animals. I was always told that girls and boys can do anything, and my parents encouraged me to express myself as I liked. I have a cis brother and we both had dolls and kitchen sets as well as trucks and toy guns.
The answer is that, it did confuse me somewhat, but ultimately it was far preferable to the horror stores I’ve heard from other trans people. I have often thought that, had my family had more rigid gender roles, my masculinity would have been more obvious and I might have been able to say that words “I am boy” far earlier than I did. As it was, I didn’t realize my constant melancholy was gender-related until I was a teen.
But, I survived my trans childhood far less traumatized than most trans people. I received my dose of shame from society, but at least in my own home, I was loved, gender-variance and all. I think my social transition was far more straightforward than many others because I had always had masculine body language, etc.–my parents never beat it out of me. And of course my hippie parents were very supportive of their trans son.
In conclusion, yes, it was more confusing–but far less traumatizing. And there is nothing wrong with realizing one’s gender identity as a teen and transitioning in early adulthood. It was developmentally appropriate. A childhood light on the gender roles is beneficial for any child–but even more so for a trans child.
I love this definition.
Joy Ladin, a Jewish scholar who is a trans woman, in an episode of On Being:
For me, this was an interesting perspective on why some people take it so hard when someone transitions, even someone not close to them, as Jenner is to most people.
And I get that it’s disorienting and destabilizing at a very low level, and so we may experience it as a kind of attack, an unwanted intrusion into foundations when we really didn’t want to inspect the foundations and thought they were supporting us just fine.
At the same time, I have to wonder. Ladin could not continue pretending to be a man (which is presumably what her distressed students would have preferred, that Ladin present as a man in such a way that they could to be innocent of the damage it was doing her). Given that she could not continue, and leaving aside those who would prefer that she simply end herself… where does that leave her? At what point in her early childhood should she have stood up, alone, to her family and her society, and broken covenant with her family and her society? At what point in her teenage years did she have the stability, the maturity, the understanding, to do that? At what point during her college years was it a good time to tell her family that she might be throwing away the tuition her family was spending? At what point during her continuing scholarship, getting her advanced degree?
And I’m reminded of the reaction of a female police officer I work with, said to another coworker and later told to me, when I came out at work, 3 years before I had the option to retire: “Why couldn’t he have waited three years?”
And that’s where I start to feel the anger ignite, and I start to get sarcastic, inside my head: So sorry to have inconvenienced you, sweetheart. If it’s any comfort, probably a lot of trans people you would have run into had the decency to kill themselves or get themselves killed before you had to endure that experience. Yay! Silver lining!
So Ladin’s perspective is interesting, and she is clearly deeply thoughtful and well worth listening to. But if we’re going to regard transition as a breaking of covenant (and also not transitioning as a breaking of covenant, since you’re clearly not what you’re pretending to be, so there’s that Catch-22)… it’s well to remember that we didn’t choose this covenant. We didn’t enlist. We were drafted. And we’ve served our time. It’s pretty crappy to say to a draftee, “Oh, and by the way, we’re going to need you to serve our needs for the rest of your life, however long you last. Thanks.”
If you want to, you can look at any attempt to transition as a trans person saying, “I will not be a slave to your comfort, anymore.”
And then I think of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, a story I cannot read without weeping, and which I once read to my teenage son, who wept with me and told me that it was the saddest story he had ever heard, and talked with me about it.
And I think about whom I have drafted, for the sake of my ignorance. When I was younger, I was confident that I would be one of those who walked away from Omelas. Now I think that, in reality, all of us stay, one way or another.
Grace
edited to correct a misgendering
Yes.
@ nobody.really at #45
Some people who identitify as having a non-binary gender, as having a gender entirely outside the binary spectrum, a genderfluid, as bigender and/or as otherwise genderqueer, also identify as transgender.
Likewise, some trans people identify as having a binary gender (eg, our gracious hosts in this conversation), and some trans people id as having a non-binary gender. For a somewhat high profile example of the latter, at least in the world of writing about sexism on the internet, see s.e. smith, who was a regular contributor to FWD Forward and Tiger Beatdown, and currently is a columnist for xoJane. (note: I don’t know whether s.e. identifies specifically as a trans non-binary person, or instead as a non-binary trans person, or indeed some other formulation, but s.e. has written about both being trans and being genderqeer.)
I know for some genderqueer people, whether they id as trans or not is influenced by whether they have chosen to transition physically (via HRT and/or one or more surgeries).
Also, and hopefully this won’t muddy the waters too much, in addition to the use of the word trans, to mean short for transgender, there also exists the more social/cultural/political umbrella term “trans*” (asterisk included), which includes transsexual, transgender, genderqueer, and gender-noncomforming people. So some gq (genderqueer) people may id as trans* but not trans. Anyway, this is pretty far removed from the original topic of the mint garden I think so I’ll stop here.
Jake Squid:
Yes. A commenter named belledame222 elsewhere wrote
In searching for that quotation in my notes, I came across this, from Julia Serano, in her book Excluded:
Jake Squid again:
Yes.
I think narratives of trans experience are essential to understanding gender as an abstract concept. So are narratives of cis experience.
Also, as we discuss gender in the abstract, remember how we apply it to individuals. Even if we could somehow discover that gender, as a concept, is 17% biological and therefore 83% social, it would not necessarily follow that gender is 17% biological in you. Maybe your gender is 0.01% nature and 99.99% nurture, but in someone else it’s 78% nature and 22% nurture. One of the most important humilities, I think, and the one never achieved by fundamentalists of any kind, is that people can be different at a very deep level, and still be equally human, so that the facts of one person’s development may not apply to another person’s development at all.
Also, as we grow and develop, things which were up in the air become resolved, often permanently. Maybe Rimonim’s gender was 1% fixed at the moment of conception, 10% fixed at the moment of birth, and 90% fixed by the age of two, all because of some complex melange of genetics, epigenetics, uterine environment, social environment, and direct socialization. We could say, in such a case, that Rimonim’s gender is basically nurture, 99% nurture. That doesn’t mean that any power on earth can change it now. That house is built, and you might as well tell Rimonim to fly with the power of his mind as tell him to walk through that wall.
An egg has lots of potential, depending largely on its environment. But don’t try feeding the seed corn to my sunny-side-up on toast. That particular chicken is never going to lay an egg.
Rimonim:
It’s interesting to realize that I also absorbed that it’s a measure of toughness to be able to drink liquor straight and to be able to fight. In our society, these are coded as masculine things, and therefore inherently superior to feminine-coded things. It’s only now, in my thirties and forties, that I’m learning to regard those impulses in me which code feminine as equally valuable, equally worthwhile, equally desirable, equally praiseworthy, for many reasons, not least of which that women are equally valuable and so things the tend, statistically, to do more are not lesser simply because by virtue of their association with women.
For me, part of my transition was disentangling throwing a punch like a woman from throwing a punch as a woman. Because there is an optimal way for my body to throw a punch, and it’s determined by aspects of body structure, not my gender identity.
As athlete Maren Seidler put it, during a discussion of masculinity and femininity in athletics,
I never thought I, as a trans woman, would be permitted to own that statement, because as a trans woman, I don’t get to define what’s feminine; I have to take it as received wisdom from people who are 99%+ cis. But I’m starting to feel the sense that I have as much right to point to my movement as one instance of feminine movement.
And it feels good.
Partly this is internal work. Partly it is the privilege of being taken as a woman by members of my society even when I’m wearing a tank-top and cut-offs and cutting lumber. That, in turn, comes from having had access to facial surgery and hormones, which comes from having had access to a job and medical care, which comes from having had the ability to ape male behavior well enough to function in my society for as long as it took.
A lot of trans women don’t have the freedom I have, now. I drove myself literally to the brink of disability and death to get it, and I’m sure there are plenty of trans women who died trying.
Was it because I learned to be tough? I don’t know. Maybe if I’d had the opportunity to learn to have a better, smarter support network, I could have done it by a completely different road, without having to be so tough.
Maybes, maybes. Coulda woulda shoulda. Whatever. Here I am.
Rimonim:
That reasonably describes my experience. I think I took it on the chin a lot less than a lot of trans people, especially those from earlier generations. A trans friend of mine who is a bit older than I am once described trans people substantially older than she is as generally “batshit crazy”. I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but I understand what she’s getting at. Forty years ago, it took a fortitude that I don’t think I have, that I think very few people have, for a trans person to survive to old age. That’s some pretty heavy selection pressure, and all of the survivors are shaped by surviving decades of encounter with that dull and rusty lathe.
Grace
“when I was a teen, I really wanted to be male for a while. Not because I felt like a boy/man, but because I wanted the privileges that came with being male. I grew out of this, since that is a crazy reason to make such massive body and life changes,”
YES! THIS!
Thanks for your honesty, Grace. It’s wonderful to have a place where we can just be open and I can ask stupid questions and say what I think and feel.
It’s not that I think nothing would change if I woke up with male parts one day – *lots* would change. But when I imagine it, the important difference I see is a different set of external rules that try to bind me in a different set of ways than the rules I’m currently subjected to. Some things would be great, others would suck. My husband and I do a lot of work on our house; when we talk with people in the field, he is asked ‘are you an engineer?’ while I am asked ‘how’d you learn all this?’. Losing the assumption that I can’t sweat copper because I don’t have a penis would be great. But gaining the assumption that I must not ever shed tears because I don’t have a vagina would suck. I just don’t want *any* rules or assumptions.
Internally, I’m not disturbed by the image of myself with a penis. Maybe it’s because I’m bi and like to play with all sorts of body parts in all sorts of ways already. I dunno. What the mental experiment brings up when I think about my body is more curiosity than anything, and no negative reaction.
And of course you’re right about transfolk not having the power to singlehandedly reinforce thousands of years of gender stereotypes. Silly me.
I haven’t experienced gender dysphoria. I believe it’s real, of course, and support efforts to relieve the pain of those who do experience it. I guess what I don’t understand is the need for the external confirmation, since I find dealing with gender socially to be mostly a pain in the ass. Gender to me feels like a stupid game everyone insists I play. I believe trans people when they say their bodies didn’t match their minds, and I can’t imagine how painful that must be. But as a conscientious objector in the social game of gender, it’s hard for me to understand someone opting to play and insisting they’ve been chosen for the wrong team. I don’t want to be on either team. Why play a game that causes you pain? I mean, I know the world is always insisting transfolk play this stupid game too, but it feels to me like they’re validating the game by saying they got on the wrong team, rather than refusing the whole game instead. I hope I haven’t caused offense and I would love to hear the thoughts of transfolk on this. How do you experience it?
annqueue:
Yup. I wouldn’t mind arresting people without having them hit on me, and I wouldn’t mind losing the assumption that it’s totally okay to interrupt me because whatever noises are coming out of my mouth can’t be as important as what a man is saying, when I’m standing there in uniform investigating a reported crime.
A friend of mine is a thoughtful trans man who has spoken up to call people out on their privilege when they were publicly telling me how I should have reacted to something which happened to me because I was trans. A great guy. I love spending time with him, which puts him in a select group. Having transitioned, he says that he thinks, with the benefit of further knowledge, that it would have been better for him not to transition, but instead live as a very butch genderqueer woman. “So,” I asked him, “have you considered detransitioning or retransitioning?” He laughed. “Hell, no! Male privilege is awesome!”
Yes, it is. And he owns his own, which is one of the things which makes his company worthwhile.
I’ll admit that there is some need for external confirmation, because I’m a social human being, not a happy hermit human being, even if I’m an introvert. But that’s a tiny part of it, compared to the need to be treated as I am rather than as people would like me to be. It’s not confirmation. It’s perception/reaction.
Yup.
Where on earth did you get the idea that I opted to play?
I was drafted. And not in the NFL sense. In the military sense.
Okay, but as you just barely pointed out, above, not playing the game is not among your options. Other people will play it for you, and include you in it, assigning you roles as they think best.
Me doing police work as a visible woman is the difference between hearing, “You know how women are,” and “You know how women are… uh, no offense.”
These misogynistic assholes don’t do me the favor of not sharing their misogynistic assholery; that’s not a choice which is given to me, apparently. So of the two, I’ll take Option B, thanks.
Well, when you figure out how to refuse the whole game, let us know how and we can try that experiment and see what we discover.
If I understand you correctly, you didn’t opt to play. Why do you think that I opted to play? I don’t get that at all. It seems to me that we all have to play, like it or not, and I’m just pointing out that I’ve been assigned the wrong position, while your current position works okay enough. We can both agree that it’s a stupid game.
Also, at the same time, since I have to play the game, I can choose to leverage the game for enjoyment, and appreciate it when others do something pretty cool within the game. That’s basically the entirety of drag performance; toying with the system to see how it squeaks and what you can communicate to others with it. To go back to the game metaphor, basketball doesn’t interest me much, and if it went away tomorrow I would not miss it, but when I work a security detail at a basketball game I can appreciate the players’ athleticism and talk enthusiastically about a really good lay-up.
A couple of months ago, I mentioned in front of a friend of mine who is a gay trans man (a different trans man from the one above), that, being happily monogamously married when I transitioned, I had never been taken out on a date. He promptly invited me out on a date. I cleared it with my wife, who thought it was adorable and hilarious, and I went on this totally platonic date with my friend. We had fun with it. As I said at the time, “We are going to ROCK this heteronormative mating ritual!” I wore evening attire which included a leather miniskirt. He wore a suit. He picked me up at my door, with flowers. He opened doors for me, and I held his arm as we walked. He bought me dinner and a drink (as he is not wealthy, I took a moment to give him half the cost, as agreed, and after that we pretended that I hadn’t). We had interesting dinner conversation, and walked around afterward, talking. He drove me home. We kissed each other on the cheek on my doorstep. It was amusing and fun and we enjoyed it.
All made possible by this stupid gender system we have.
I’m not saying that it’s a good gender system. I’m just saying, to paraphrase Cordelia Vorkosigan, that it can be made to work. Sometimes.
Grace
Had to Google Jazz Jennings. All I can say is “14? That’s not even an age.” Shit, I wasn’t that put-together at 14, and I’m cis. I’m not that put-together now.
Before I get to what I came in to ask, I want to respond to what Jake Squid said at 28:
So that reflects my experiences: I don’t feel like a cis man, I feel like a person — but in a society that has no doubts that cis men are people, I’m not sure there is necessarily a difference, that feeling like one belongs in the unmarked category is automatically going to be different from not actively feeling like one belongs in any category.
I’m not trying to deny the experiences of people who do feel male or feel cis, nor Jake’s power and authority of self-description, and I may be misunderstanding their (his?) point.
I see other people who are cis but not male said the same thing, so this may be truer of cis-ness than of maleness.
>So here’s my question.
It seems to me that wen I say “I am male,” there is no test you (generic) can do on me that will definitively show I am (or was, depending on the nature of the test) male, or that will fail to definitively show that I am/was not male. That is, there is no test of maleness with a 0% false positive rate or a 0% false negative rate. Moreover, this appears to be a fact about gender identity rather than a fact about our understanding or about the technology available, though I could be wrong about that.
This being the case, what does sexual orientation mean? Especially homosexual or heterosexual. I wouldn’t say I’m attracted to femaleness — I have no way to detect that. Do we need to define these things around presentation and/or bits?Abandon the concept entirely?
Tamme:
Tamme, I didn’t feel that you disrespected me. (I’m not sure exactly what you’re referring to; is it possible you were thinking that I wrote something which someone else wrote? I do that sometimes.) This thread is specifically for talking about this stuff, with the understanding that there will be missteps and awkwardness, because look at us, we’re human. I think you’re participating in good will, and I encourage you to continue participating as you feel comfortable.
Grace
I’m posting this from my phone so I can’t embed it, but this thread seems the right place to put it. It’s from NBCBLK, LGBTQ African Americans Living Out Loud: https://www.facebook.com/msnbc/videos/944667685629484/
@Grace: Thank you for your kind words, but I think there are too many cis people taking up too much space in this thread, and while I can’t stop them, I can at least prevent myself from being part of the problem.
Like gender, I suspect this is slightly tautological “you’re straight if you’re primarily attracted to people whose presentation you interepret as aligning with a different gender presentation than what you have”–which may not have definite boundaries, even for individual people, let alone as a group. I know one straight man who continued dating his (now ex-)boyfriend for a time after his boyfriend transitioned; but I doubt that he would have begun the relationship had his boyfriend already been known to him as a boyfriend.
Body details obviously matter to many people, but, I think, somewhat fewer than gender presentation matters to, and not just because we usually don’t see people naked before we hit on them. I like to think of this comic when I’m pondering that.
As another area of interest, some people attracted to only one gender change which gender they’re attracted to post-transition, and some don’t. (I don’t know enough trans people to have good statistics on that, but there are a couple of instances of each pattern amongst my acquaintances. Grace, rimonim, do you know if there’s any kind of broad-level information on that?)
The more traditional orientation terms (homo, hetero, bi) suffer from connoting a relationship between your gender and your partner’s gender, which can be wrong, insufficient, or confusing from two sides and not just one. I haven’t heard proposals for better terms, though, even though I’ve been hearing that complaint for a decade or more at least.
Hershele Ostropoler:
They mean what they’ve always meant, with a couple of caveats.
Well, the standard heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual system filters attraction through gender. If you’re attracted to women and you’re a man, you’re heterosexual. If you’re attracted to women and you’re a woman, you’re homosexual.
I’m attracted to women. I’m a woman. I’m homosexual, or more colloquially, a lesbian. Before I transitioned, when I was in the closet, I was apparently a man, so I was apparently heterosexual. My orientation didn’t change during transition (some do, most don’t), but the word we use to describe it did, because that word also references something about me, the appearance of which changed.
We can remove the filtration. If you’re attracted to men, you’re androphilic. If you’re attracted to women, you’re gynephilic. If you’re attracted to men and women, you’re biphilic. (Or you could just say “bisexual” since we use the same word for men and women.)
You have a male pseudonym, so I’m guessing that you’re male. If you weren’t trying to step very carefully in this discussion, but were having a wild, ranging discussion with friends, would you just take the shortcut and throw it out there that you’re attracted to women? Then you’re gynephilic and heterosexual.
Of course, just because a person is attracted only to women, is gynephilic, does not mean that they are attracted to all women. (I know that this may seem blindingly obvious, but I’ve actually had to explain it to some of my coworkers. No, Sadly Homophobic Colleague, being bisexual does not mean that you actively have sex with men and women. It means that you’re capable of being attracted to both men and women.)
You’re attracted to what you’re attracted to. None of us gets to pick what trips our trigger, who you find yourself looking at when you’re walking down the street and do the headsnap a millisecond after the back of your brain says, “Oh! Check it out!” If you’re a standard model gynephile, then you’re attracted to people who look, sound, and smell more-or-less like standard-issue women. You may tend to find women who look like this, or sound like that, a little more or less attractive, but we still call you gynephile.
So how do trans people change this? For cis people in general, not much. A tiny bit around the edges. If you find yourself attracted to a pre-transition trans man, then technically you’re experiencing sexual attraction toward a man, but we all understand that you’re experiencing that sensation because he looks, sounds and smells like a woman. It doesn’t mean you’re gay, or even heteroflexible. It’s a technicality which proves the rule.
Some people are attracted to women, but also like playing with a woman’s penis. One term for people like that is heteroflexible (though there are different ways to fall into the heteroflexible camp). For people who like women with a penis, trans women who have transitioned hormonally but had no genital surgery and are okay with that (and they exist) are an object of attraction. But let’s be clear: a man attracted to a woman with a penis is not gay. Apparently this is a huge concern in Heteronormativeland. Dan Savage is hilarious on this, and has to explain it constantly: it’s not the gay guys who are looking for trans women. It’s the straight guys who also like penis.
People who are attracted to trans women because they’re trans have a tough row to hoe, socially; hetero people despise them, trans women accuse them of objectifying them, and on and on.
People who spend a lot of time obsessing about what it makes them because they experienced attraction to a trans person have, I think, a lot of internalized homophobia to work on. You’re attracted to what you’re attracted to. As long as you have legal and practical consent from the people you want to play with, go nuts.
Grace
Harlequin:
I used to hear that it was thirds. One third remained attracted to what they had been attracted to, one third switch, and one third ended up basically bi. More recently I hear that most people don’t switch, but some do, and some of the latter become bi.
Sexuality is complicated. I’m sure some people actually switch. But I think some of it is the revealing of what’s been suppressed. Pre-transition, a trans woman may deny any attraction for men, and mean it, because she doesn’t want to be a gay man or be taken for a gay man. But, post-transition, when it becomes “okay”, because heterosexuality is universally accepted, their attraction for men can finally come out and play. I suspect that there’s a lot of that, going both ways. But it’s just a suspicion.
I’m not aware that anyone has good numbers on it. Probably the best point-of-collection would be an endocrinologist who sees a lot of trans patients. I’ll put it to my endo next time I see him.
Grace
Hershele Ostropoler @ 59
This is a powerful insight. Thank you for sharing it.
It also speaks a bit to some of my previous internal experiences with thinking about trans people, and trans women in particular. I remember attending a Discussion Night (regularly held at my university’s LGBTQ+ resource and support centre) wherein a variety of trans* students and alumni were invited to discuss their experiences, followed by questions from others in attendance (explicitly including cis people). I eagerly asked something along the lines of “has your experience transitioning given you any new insights into or ideas about gender, and how it impacts the way others treat you?”, only to find that many of the people in attendance said they hadn’t thought about it too much. Initially, this was surprising to me. How could this be so? But then I realized, I’m not trans, and I think about gender all the time. Because I am a woman, and thus on the receiving end of endless gendered and sexist micro-aggressions (and some macro-aggressions too).
I think what I had hoped to hear about that night was rather the opposite of nobody.really‘s inquery/request in comment 24: I had read some pieces written by trans people about their experiences with male privilege and without it, and I was hungry for more of this proof positive of everyday sexism, and the wild feeling of validation I felt when I encountered such descriptions. As soon as I figured out what was going on in my head, I worked hard to undo my partial perception of trans people – and their first person narratives – as the silver bullet that would solve our highly gendered and patriarchal system forever. And so I sympathize a bit, with some of what annqueue wrote in comment 46, because it can be all to easy to think of trans people not as people who are “transgender” or whose “gender has transitioned” but instead as people who have “transcended gender”. And then you want them to tell you where you can get your own pair of red sequinned shoes and go home to Kansas where you never ever ever have to be fight to be treated with the same respect half your coworkers and fellow students are automatically accorded as their due. BUT, as Grace pointed out, that’s not how any of this works.
Harlequin @ 63: Perhaps this is nitpicky or off topic (it’s a huge pet peeve of mine and I’m erring on the side of “the moderators can snip it if it’s not appropriate in this thread”), but while I enjoy and appreciate most of the comic you linked — which I have seen before — I cannot abide in good conscience the idea of a “gold star gay man” or “gold star lesbian”. It creates a hierarchy against those who come out later in life, including those who did not discover their identity until later. It likewise casts as less pure and/or committed people whose sexuality is fluid to some degree and has shifted over time to and/or from an exclusive dating preference. And it is incredibly biphobic.
As a general response to the things everybody has been saying, I think that for the kinds of left-wing, trans supportive people who are likely to be posting here, there’s a kind of mental block because I think many of us would prefer not to be recognized as or judged by any gender at all.
When it comes to race in the USA, being white is the privileged position but it’s also very often a position that isn’t policed. I live in an area where open racism isn’t particularly tolerated, and there’s very little pressure on me whatsoever to somehow “act white”. I can’t sing along with hip hop songs that have the n-word in them but that’s basically the only overt way I can think of that my race effects me; other than that I can usually go along happily forgetting about my race.
The male gender may be the privileged one, but unlike race it is also heavily policed. I’d argue that it’s as heavily policed as the female gender. I can’t forget that I’m male in the same way that I can forget that I’m white or cis or hetero or what-have-you.
I remember when I was a young child I often wished I had been born a girl, because I liked girl’s cartoons (I was a Brony decades before it was cool, or, you know, invented.) and I preferred the calmer, less physically aggressive way that the girls socialized as opposed to the boys. Growing up in the late 80s and 90s there was a serious push in media to promote the message that girls can do it too, that girls shouldn’t be excluded and that they can do extreme sports or whatever just as well as boys. I remember being mad that there wasn’t much push in the opposite direction, much effort to assert that boys can be dainty, or have delicate feelings, or be good at knitting and cooking.
As Grace Annam says above, a little girl who doesn’t want to wear skirts is in a very different position to a little boy who does.
Now that I have more perspective I’m better able to recognize the difficulties girls faced then I was as a 9-year-old, but in many ways I’m still very uncomfortable being a man. I would prefer to be the more passive person when it comes to starting up romantic interactions; I’d like to project an aura that tells people to be careful to respect my personal space (I’m not good at this even as a man, it seems far more difficult for women); I’d like to have women as my romantic partners; I’d like to wear men’s clothes (Maybe experiment with make-up? Sometimes I think about it); I’d like to enjoy peace and calm; I like to squeal at cute animals.
There’s no gender role that fits that, and on the other hand, gender roles in modern Portland, OR, USA aren’t exactly so strong that those behaviors are hugely dangerous for a man or a woman; indeed, I’d say all of them are fairly common in all genders. “Genderqueer” is potentially a label for this kind of thing, but it’s not a particular solution to the problem of feeling like people are judging me by a standard I don’t agree with or want applied to me, because “genderqueer” is not a widely accepted standard; in fact, declaring yourself to be “genderqueer” in modern American society just invites further scrutiny, when the whole issue is a feeling that you face excessive scrutiny already.
There is, I think, a fundamental disconnect when I (and I believe a lot of others) hear people say something like
Because I think “Why on earth would someone want that? I’ve spent a lot of my life wishing people wouldn’t see me as a man or treat me like one.”
I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m calling people out, or being whiny, but the more I think about it the more I don’t think this is entirely fair:
Because I really don’t think it’s as easy for a cissexual person’s gender to just vanish from their consciousness into haze of easy privilege; I think whiteness (In a modern American context) vanishes much more easily.
I can think of many times when, as a cissexual person, I have been deeply frustrated that I have been perceived as a man, while I can’t think of any time my race has frustrated me in a similar manner. I don’t long for people to look past my race; I can simply trust them to do so and almost inevitably they do.
Whereas even as a cissexual person, I don’t feel the same about my gender.
I say this not to deny my privilege, nor to trivialize other peoples’ much greater problems, but just to point out that not seeing gender, or attempting to look past it, is not the path of least resistance in our society.
Hershele Ostropoler:
I obviously can’t speak to your personal experience, however the science suggests that generally people do have the ability to detect the difference between maleness and femaleness. For example, research indicates there are specific brain areas that perform the role of distinguishing the gender of faces. Another interesting study looked at people with developmental prosopagnosia, that is the inability to recognise faces, and found that despite these people lacking the ability to identify or compare faces, they had the same ability as the control group at identifying the gender of the faces. There’s also research that suggests that there is also a neurological basis to the ability to recognise the gender of a voice.
Listening to the way people describe their sexuality, I can’t help but presume that these neurological structures are linked in some way to people’s sexuality. To use Grace’s terminology, an androphilic person might have the part of their brain that identifies a person a male linked to the part that stimulates sexual attractions. Similarly, that same person might have the identifies a person as female part linked in a way that inhibits sexual attraction. Different combinations of the above would match being gynephilic, bisexual (both stimulatory) or asexual (both inhibitory). Of course, being biology, there are going to be innumerous variations and inconsistencies within those broad classifications.
Socialisation obviously adds a layer of complexity to the issue. The mind can be conditioned to behave in all manner of ways. Long hair & makeup can become to seem intrinsically female as curvy eyebrows or a rounded jaw. While I think it’s important to acknowledge the biological foundations of gender and sexuality, I don’t think it’s reasonable to dismiss the socialised elements simply because they’re the metaphorical equivalent of a dog drooling over a bell. They’re all an important part of the human experience.
rimonim:
Reading this, I wonder how what I wrote above plays into being trans. It seems “tuning into male socialization” would mean seeing a collection of individuals, identifying them as male, identify male as meaning like-me, and then have a desire to socialise with people who had the trait like-me. Does this make sense to you?
Christopher,
You make some good points.
I’ve watched my brother having problems in that sense: He went to college, and then never really pushed hard for a good, hard-hitting career. He got married to a woman who pushed hard, and he just kind of naturally fell into the background. He was actually very good with the kids, and he did a lot more housework of all types than I have seen with most female housewives, but instead of being “a good wife”, he was a good-fer-nuthin layabout loser. Solely because of his gender.
His wife grew tired of it and divorced him for exactly that reason. He also got lots of crap from others, in particular her mother. Strangely enough, she got custody of the kids and he got child support payments. He got NO alimony payments, although a woman in my state may well have.
There was a male-to-female transsexual on this board (I forgot the name, but I think it started with “Sh” or “Sch”) who opined that society wasn’t men getting everything and oppressing women, it was more like you would be happier in either a male role or female role based on your personality. If you are hard-driving and career-oriented, for instance, you would be better appearing as a man to society. Or at least that was the case 50 years ago; today that is not really how it is, because women’s roles are now broader and more fluid. There are Hilary Clinton and Carly Fiorina, and there are sheltered houswives purely living off men. If you just want to be taken care of, and be dependent on someone else for your money and protection from the world, you are a LOT better off appearing to be a woman.
Harlequin,
There’s no good data as far as I know. I think some people really do switch but, seconding Grace, a lot of the time the congruence produced by transition makes it “safe” to express the attraction that was already there. In my case, I identified as bi as a young teen, then id’d as attracted only to women for many years; recently, I have begun to identify as bi/queer again. Before transition, any sexual interaction with men/masculine people seemed to force me into the “woman” box very strongly–while interactions with women/feminine people affirmed my masculine identity. (Thanks, heteronormativity.) Now that I am post-transition, my attraction to men and masculine genderqueer people does not invalidate my gender identity.
To put it another way, I have zero interest in being a woman having straight sex with a guy. I have a lot of interest in having gay sex with a guy, as a guy. I think similar dynamics are at work with a lot of trans people whose labels change during or after transition–though probably some people’s orientations really do change.
Interestingly, it is definitely true that trans people are a lot more likely to be LGB than cis people. It’s hard to get good numbers, but I’ve seen a few surveys that estimate about 1/3 of trans women are lesbians and about 1/6 of trans men are gay.
The question of trans people and sexual orientation labels is an interesting one. I actually don’t think binary trans people–trans women and men like Grace and me–really complicate this so much. As Grace said, sure, sometimes one might be attracted to a person who looks like a lady but is really dude; but this is the exception that proves the rule. In general, we fit reasonably well into the straight/gay/bi framework. Cis people routinely agonize about what it means that they’re attracted to somebody trans, but I agree with Grace that this is internalized transphobia and homophobia, period. The fact is that male and female bodies are pretty darn similar, and that social and perceived gender matters a lot more for attraction than the exact configuration of body parts.
Nonbinary people on the other hand–including genderqueer, agender, and genderfluid people, and others–really do not fit into this system. The labels are based on the idea that there are 2 and only 2 genders, that they are opposites, that you have one of these, and thus you are attracted either to the same, the opposite, or both genders. But what if your gender is neither male nor female? What if your partner is nonbinary and/or you are particularly attracted to some flavor of nonbinary folks? If a masculine genderqueer person gets with a feminine genderqueer person, is that gay or straight? Are two AFAB masculine genderqueer people in a relationship gay or lesbian? Answer: both, neither, or whatever they tell you.
The straight/gay/bi system cannot adequately describe relationships involving nonbinary people–it just falls apart. This is why a lot of people describe their orientation as simply queer.
Desipis,
It does–I don’t know whether that’s all that’s at work, but I absolutely think that is part of it, for both trans and cis people.
SWA,
The term you’re looking for is trans woman. I’m sure this wasn’t your intention, but this wording is a bit like calling gay men and lesbians “homosexuals.” It’s out of step with the community and signals a subtle disrespect. It emphasizes the assigned sex (by putting it first) and the fact of being trans (transsexual) instead of emphasizing personhood and lived gender. The terms trans woman and trans man are preferred for binary trans people because “trans” is simply an adjective describing a woman or a man–as it should be.
Christopher:
Yes. It’s a category Julia Serano would call “unmarked”. It is considered the default, the norm which other racial categories vary from.
Because they’re not you? :) Not to put too fine a point on it…
Me too! We have so much in common!
I’m not intending to make fun of you; just pointing out a commonality and having a laugh at my own expense. Sometimes it helps to call out the absurdity of the whole thing.
It sounds like you don’t fit well in the modern Western gender schema, for sure. This is not a huge surprise, since it’s utterly simplistic: two base states with a small amount of variation permitted, and all else verboten. You’re going to have to carve out your own space or see if you fit in the ones which other people have started carving.
Yeah, there’s no fix for the scrutiny. You’re non-standard, I’m non-standard. We’re going to get scrutinized (and policed), because there’s no shorthand for which people have already worked out their assumptions.
You may be something of an activist-of-necessity, carving your own path. Lots of people do it. It’s not usually easy, but it often beats the conformity alternative.
You could always go with “man who’s a bit genderqueer”. Then people can take that how they want to. If they need simplicity, they can stop on “man”, and you deal with that. If they say, “What’s ‘a bit genderqueer’ mean?” then you can say, “Y’know, not needing to prove I’m a man, wearing eyeliner if I want to, letting myself to squeal at cute animals.” Then we can wait for the well-intentioned person to assure you that none of that makes you not a man in 3… 2… 1…
The victory condition is “be happy being gender normative”. For us, there’s no victory condition. So it’s all in whether you can find a way to enjoy playing.
Grace
Rimonim:
As it happens, I am friends with a couple of trans guys who are married to each other. When I was getting to know them, I said, “So, may I ask a probing question which is none of my business?” They said, “Sure.” I said, “So, I see that you’re married to each other. Are you gay, or bi, or pan, or something I wot not of?” And they said, “Meh. Whatever. We’re queer.” And I said, “Okay!” and filed it away for future rumination.
Myself, I’m a lesbian. There are a lot of lesbians out there who would agree, and a lot who would disagree. In a space which contains both, I might also choose “Meh. Whatever. I’m queer” as the path around a battle I don’t see any profit in fighting just then. It’s true, it’s just less specific.
Umbrella terms can be really handy for avoiding conflict.
Elegantly put. I eagerly await the day when the male-to-female and female-to-male terminology is embarrassingly archaic, for exactly the reasons you lay out.
Grace
“The term you’re looking for is trans woman. I’m sure this wasn’t your intention, but this wording is a bit like calling gay men and lesbians “homosexuals.” It’s out of step with the community and signals a subtle disrespect. It emphasizes the assigned sex (by putting it first) and the fact of being trans (transsexual) instead of emphasizing personhood and lived gender. The terms trans woman and trans man are preferred for binary trans people because “trans” is simply an adjective describing a woman or a man–as it should be.”
———————————
No offense intended. This is not an area of life that I know much about, so I have to be a bit more careful about how I phrase things.
SWA:
No harm done. It’s a term in common use, but starting, I think, to fade. It’s a term I used to refer to myself, when I was taking my first baby steps talking to trans people. But after awhile it started to irk and I moved away from it, for the reasons Rimonim outlined, much like “pass”, a term I now refuse to use.
Grace
Just a couple of suggested resources:
For those who have trouble getting their heads around the whole “what makes a gender assignment, anyway?” thing, read “Sexing the Body” by Anne Fausto-Sterling. Fascinating look at the many, many markers (most of which are unseen and unquestioned in the vast majority of births) that may be pointed to in order to declare “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl,” and it can be either a light or heavy read depending on whether you choose to read all the endnotes or not.
For those who think “gender is a construct” means “there is no role for biology,” read “As Nature Made Him” by John Colapinto, about David Reimer – a man who was surgically reassigned as female shortly after his birth, and his family was told “just raise the child as a girl and you’ll never know the difference.” Which is emphatically not what happened.
For the record, the idea that “gender is a construct” as put forth by Judith Butler is referring to gender PERFORMANCE, not gender IDENTITY. Two very different things. Butler’s work (which is a pain in the arse to read, and frankly I just recommend Riki Wilchins’ little book on Queer Theory instead) points out that there is nothing “natural” about assuming that long hair/colorful, decorated clothing = female and short hair/subdued clothing = male – you can point to all kinds of times and places in history when this was not the case, and what we’re doing now in the West has no more connection to some “natural” way of doing gender than a 40th generation Xerox does of the original (and frankly even less so).
And JB has explicitly rejected TERFs and the idea that gender identity is something one can put on or reject out of sheer choice: http://theterfs.com/2014/05/01/judith-butler-addresses-terfs-and-the-work-of-sheila-jeffreys-and-janice-raymond/
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I mean. In another time and place where the definition of masculine or feminine matched my inclinations, I might think of myself as one or the other.
Rimonim writes, elsewhere, possibly inspired by this conversation:
This seems to echo some of the discussion around Christopher’s recent question, and also my little story about playing with gender.
Grace
I have been following this discussion with interest and already learned a lot. So first of all, thanks for hosting this space and using valuable spoons to anwer questions.
When talking to people about issues surrounding trans people, I am often very unsure about what to say. Because while I am normally a very logic-based person, my understanding of trans*issues is based more on emotion (and a desire to do as little damage as possible).
I see absolutely no reason to disbelieve someone who tells me that the gender that they grew up being told was theirs is not actually their own. I see no need to question when they tell me about the pain this causes and the need to be recognized as their real gender (because seriously, who would voluntarily face transphobia unless the alternative is even more horrible). Accepting what people tell me about themselves, their identities, their experiences, is just basic human decency (or should be).
But this approach does not always lead to well-reasoned arguments, so thank you for givin me so much material incase this comes up again in conversation.
Now I have a question about the limits of this garden: Is it ok to ask questions about the recent revival of the use of “transracial” to describe white people performing a different race (instead of the original meaning of transracial adoption/ adoptees)? Because I have been trying to articulate why that is not the same, but find myself often lost for logic-based arguments.
If this is not the place for that discussion, I apologize.
I can see why that would irk. But can I ask, if someone did want to express the concept – for instance, if someone were to say, “for many trans folks, being able to ‘pass’ can be a safety concern” – what terminology would you prefer they use? Would it be better to say “pass for cis,” so that listeners wouldn’t be able to assume that it meant “pass for male/female”?
lauren, thank you for telling us that you’ve learned a lot. That’s a lot of what keeps me pushing.
I think that the discussion and struggles around race have a lot to teach us as human beings, and a lot to teach us about gender identity. There are certainly parallels. That said, there are also divergences, and it’s easy to make a mess. I have learned things from discussion of race which I found useful in discussions, but I’ve learned to tread carefully.
I’m white. I grew up in a largely white environment, went to a largely white school, and live in a very white portion of the country. I try to be very careful when I participate in discussions of race. Clearly white people need to be part of that discussion, but we already outnumber everyone else (though that’s changing) and we are so prone, on average, to saying clueless, entitled, privilege, ignorant things, and so very anxious to not be individually responsible for any of the racist crap in this bold, post-racial society of ours. (That was sarcasm.) So I think, broadly, that white people need to do more shutting up. It’s not to say that white people can’t get it (read Tim Wise), but it’s certainly not my area of expertise.
So I’d be very careful participating in such a discussion, and I don’t think I’m the right person to moderate one. Perhaps Rimonim feels more able in this regard, in which case, it’s possible I could be convinced.
But for now, I’m gonna take the cautious path and say let’s not attempt that discussion, at least not yet.
For asking if something was on-topic? Don’t be silly. :)
Grace
Ampersand:
It would be far better to say “pass for cis”, because, indeed, everyone assumes that you mean “pass for [gender of identification]”. And actually sometimes that’s what trans people who haven’t given it much thought DO mean, not realizing both the implication and the baggage that “pass” carries with it. Because, of course, before it was used in reference to trans people it was used in reference to black people who could “pass” as white… that is to say, as something which they were not, even by their own understanding.
So, y’know, to carelessly move it over to trans people is to simultaneously imply that trans people who are presenting as ourselves are faking being our actual gender. This is okay, perhaps, if you are referring to a drag queen, who is “she” by courtesy and convention and most of whom would tell you that their gender identity is male. It’s not okay when referring to trans women.
But pass has a further problem: it is both an (ahem) transitive and an intransitive verb. You can simply say, “pass” without putting an object on it, and so when you’re speaking fast, or feeling lazy, you can get away with not specifying what people are passing as, and as you note, that leaves it to the listener to infer that we are “passing” as our gender-of-identification, and implies that we are therefore not that.
Instead, I use “seem cis enough”. “Seem” requires an object. To take your example: “For many trans folks, being able to seem cis enough can be a safety concern.” It implies deception, but makes it clear that it’s survival deception and also that the deception is that people assume we are cis, not that people assume we are (for instance, in the case of trans women) women. Because when people assume that trans women are women, they’re actually getting it right. The deception is that we’re able to conceal the fact that we’re trans.
Which, y’know, is beside the point when we’re buying groceries.
Grace
Ampersand @ 81
Obviously I’m not Grace (and indeed I ended up cross-posting with her!), but the terminology I use (though of course I’m very open to being corrected!) is that discussed in Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl. She suggests that instead of “passing” we talk about how a various person is “read”. Before I say a couple things about the advantages of the “read” language, let me quickly address a few major problems with the “passing” language. Firstly, whether you (generic) are describing someone passing as a woman, or passing as cis, you instantly render “not passing” a literal ‘failure’. Secondly, “to pass” also implies deception, as in “to pass [something] off as”. Obviously this is why the “to pass as a man” construction is right out. But it also contains the slightly more subtle transphobia of centering ‘cis’ as the normative, more desirable state.
The “to read” / “to be read” terminology more accurately describes the process going on inside any given person’s head as they encounter other people and attempt to identify the gender of those people – that is to say, how someone is read has a great deal to do with the people doing the reading, the location and circumstances of the encounter, and the context of our highly and rigidly gendered society.
Using “read” also doesn’t single out / Other trans people, and it makes space for discussing the experiences of other gender-orientation-minorities, such as agender people. All sorts of people, with all sorts of gender identities, all sorts of gender expressions, and all sorts of cis or trans histories, may be read all sorts of ways by all sorts of people, and the act of describing a person’s gender being read doesn’t give any clues as to the identity or history of that person (very much unlike the use of “passing”).
Furthermore, it is just as easy to use “read” to delineate the different experiences of being assumed to be cis, or assumed to be trans, again with the added benefit of not indicating the history and/or identity of the person being read.
Lastly (and while this is a compelling reason to me, I don’t think it would trump any of the above reasons), the “to read as” / “to be read as” formulation is easily exportable to other circumstances and situations, including race (where “passing” terminology is also frequently used), disability, and many others. For example: a particular woman may be read by some people as pregnant, and by others as ‘merely’ fat; sometimes two women in a romantic relationship are read in public as sisters; and due to my tendency to dress like Kimmy Schmidt and general habit of neither wearing makeup nor straightening my hair, I am often read as much younger than really I am.
rimonim @ 71:
This reflects my instinct; gender identity aside, if I noticed that one-quarter of one percent of the people I was attracted to were men, I’d feel comfortable saying I’m straight without so much as an asterisk if context doesn’t absolutely demand that level of precision. But my question isn’t the transphobic “oh, shit what if I’m digging a lady and the person’s actually a dude?” so much as (the hopefully less transphobic) “what about a person does describing myself as ‘a heterosexual man’ indicate I’m attracted to, since there’s nothing that can be determined from the outside that definitively marks someone as female? Is everyone really pansexual?”
That is, I have no qualms about the prospect of loving a man, but the things I desire or demand in a partner are largely statistically predictive, to varying degrees, of femaleness, but none of them predict it with complete reliability. If I can’t say “I am attracted to X, therefore I am attracted to women” what could my basis be for saying “I am attracted to women” even be?
Typing this out, I think the division in my mind is “if I liked certain features almost exclusively found in women, but also kinda liked other features almost exclusively found in men, I’d still call myself ‘straight'” versus “I like certain features almost exclusively found in women, but ‘almost’ is the key word there, so I’m not sure ‘straight’ applies or even has meaning.” I’m not sure if that division makes sense. I’m straight in the sense that it’s the term that will be least misleading to the people playing the “whom will Hershele be attracted to” game (guaranteed not to liven up even the most boring parties). But nothing about my desires and demands makes “straight” logically necessary.
Hershele Ostropoler:
“I observe that the physical traits of human beings tend to fall into two clusters, and I am attracted to human beings in that cluster.” If you want to filter it through your own identity, then you add, “…and not this cluster I’m in.”
¿No?
Grace
I actually think it’s really interesting that, for a lot of people, attraction seems to be to gender characteristics over sex characteristics. I’m bisexual enough that I don’t have an intuitive understanding of why people are straight or gay (which no doubt varies by person anyway) so I sort of look at this stuff with an anthropologist on Mars gaze. I’ve always tended to assume monosexuality was a genitals-first, gender-next, thing, with gender-first people being more rare. It’s pretty refreshing to see, in various parts of my life, that they’re not that rare at all.
Slate: How Do Transgender People Fit into LGBTQ?
Grace
The following article may be of interest: Not Born this Way: On Transitioning as a Transwoman Who Has Never Felt “Trapped in the Wrong Body”. Please note that while most of the comments are supportive, there is a least one pretty long thread that was very disrespectful and invalidating (not to mention showed poor reading comprehension).
How to Make Love to a Trans Person, by Gabe Moses:
So, this discussion ended kind of abruptly. Everyone all set? Thinking deep thoughts?
Grace
I just wanted to pop in and say that I found this discussion enlightening and interesting, thanks for providing a forum for it.
My wife and I have 7 month old twins and are trying our best to raise them in a “gender neutral” manner, and discussions like these are helping me get a better understanding of all the experiences and thoughts out there on the subject of gender. To clarify, this basically just entails not using pronouns with them and not telling others what their external genitalia are (“We’re waiting for them to tell us” is our usual response to the question of what gender they are). That is, for now. Once language and more agency develop, the plan is to do our best to describe the wonderful array of experiences that people have in regards to gender, sexuality, etc. and let that help frame and guide choices of what kind of clothing, toys, etc. our children decide to interact with. Hopefully by the time our little ones are asking questions about such subjects we can answer in as holistic a manner as possible.
This sort of thing was touched upon in a few of the comments (Phil 44, Grace 47, and Rimonim 52), but I’m curious both of what the people in this discussion think of this sort of parenting paradigm and if there has been any discussion among trans communities about incorporating the latest understanding of these topics into parenting practices. I’ve read the anthology “Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices” which touched on some individuals’ thoughts, and the book “Gender Neutral Parenting: Raising kids with the freedom to be themselves” gives a good rundown of a lot of relevant facts re: Intersex, Trans, Cognitive Biases related to Gender and their impact on development, and more.
There was a big hubbub around the concept of gender neutral parenting back in 2011 around a child named Storm in Toronto, and apparently that family got a lot of hate mail, verbal abuse, etc., but so far we haven’t really received any negative reactions, only positive or confused :D
Aapje wrote:
Far and away the best response I have seen to Elinor Burkett’s piece. It is detailed, and moving, and pointed, and snarky without cruelty, and gently modelling good behavior.
A friend of mine commented, not long after the Vogue cover, “I fully support Caitlyn Jenner, but did she have to dress up like a Playboy bunny?” I considered for a short period, and then offered him this: “I think that there is not one single thing Caitlyn could have done that would not have subjected her to criticism about what she should have done.” There is no moss growing on my friend; he thought about my answer for a second and then laughed, and said ruefully, “You’re right.”
Another reaction to Burkett’s piece, and Caitlyn’s choices generally on how she wants to live her life.
Here is a more direct, though less beautifully skillful, reply to Burkett’s piece.
Yes, Aapje, I would say that I am broadly familiar with “the stuff that was said about Caitlin.”
Don’t forget to read the rest of this thread, and the other one I suggested.
Grace
Nate:
I’m very glad to hear that. I suspect that the pressures of that situation will build slowly, as will your appreciation of their relentlessness. However, I hope that you continue not to get hate mail. That can really take its toll.
I think that attempts at gender-neutral parenting are wonderful and interesting and pushing in the right direction. We pushed in that direction with ours, though not comprehensively, and the nature of my career led us to a far more traditional apparent family structure than we had envisioned, at least until I transitioned. We did not research on that exact subject, so it sounds like you’ve done more homework than I.
Grace
Another good reaction to Burkett’s piece, and the sort of thinking which went into it.
Also.
Grace
@ Nate —
Thanks for sharing your experiences and perspective. If you haven’t checked it out already, I’d recommend investigating the archives of the blog “Raising My Boychick: Parenting, Privilege, and Rethinking the Norm”. It’s inactive at the moment, but there are a wealth of posts on the “gender diverse parenting” approach the author has taken with her, in her words, gender creative son (and later a bit about her newborn daughter). Here’s a sample post along those lines (with bonus discussion in the comments from the teacher mentioned in the post): A question of pronouns: two conversations on gender.
Also, although it is was published over thirty years ago in 1982 and contains some stories written several years earlier, I have to recommend the anthology “Stories for Free Children”. The very first story is about gender-neutral parenting : ) I loved reading all the stories when I was growing up (in the 90’s and 00’s), and while it’s occasionally a bit dated, it is a beautiful collection full of love and respect for the diversity of children and their experiences.
@Grace
I have read one of those before and the others are mostly well written indeed. However, my intent was not to take the discussion in the direction of what Caitlin may be/should be/is doing, but rather to focus on the world view of the people who are criticizing her. This goes beyond transgender issues, as that world view is much broader than any single issue. Burkett has an opinion on transwomen because of how she looks at cis-men and -women. She responds how she does not because of any actual consideration for transgenders, but because transwomen threaten her own identity as a woman.
It’s similar to how you can look at the pre-civil war South and discuss it as a agricultural society looking to provide great wealth to a fairly small elite using cheap labor. Or you can focus on how they got that cheap labor (slavery). Both are valid perspectives, but they are not the same discussion.
Since I don’t want to hijack this thread, I will stick to the other one.
To Aapje’s example of sports:
There is a fighter in the UFC named Fallon Fox who was born a man, went through puberty as a man but had gender reassignment surgery and is now fighting as a woman. The last woman she fought “reportedly suffered a concussion, a broken orbital bone, and required staples in her head.” Ronda Rousey, the current female UFC champion whose last opponent lasted precisely 38 seconds in the ring with her, thinks Fox should not be fighting as a woman. Her comments can be heard in a video embedded here. She appears quite articulate, BTW. Setting aside your reaction to a) the entire existence of the UFC and b) the commentary on the site, I’m curious as to what you think of Ms. Rousey’s reasoning. I think she’s right.
I share people’s appreciation for Grace’s work on this site. As I mentioned previously in The Mint Garden, I imagine her efforts here will become a field of microaggressions: Every request for clarification will come to seem like a demand for self-justification. So let me again express my thanks.
That said, I think Aapje raises some fair questions. I don’t fault Grace if she declines to respond to the queries, but that’s no reflection on the merit of the queries.
And the issue of gender/sex segregation in athletics strikes me as an especially good illustration of G.K. Chesterton’s argument in The Gender Fence thread: Before I would say this segregation is justified or not, I’d want to have some idea of the function(s) it serves. And this might require a discussion of the function that sports serves in general – for participants, for spectators, for organizers/administrators, for society. In short, this could require unpacking a lot of unstated assumptions.
Skipping ahead, let’s consider other forms of segregation in sports. Almost every sport involves segregation by skill: Major League Baseball teams don’t generally compete against AAA teams or college teams. Varsity teams don’t generally compete against Junior Varity teams. Division I teams don’t compete against Division II teams.
Moreover, the sports of boxing and wrestling involve segregation by size — even at the highest levels. No matter how skillful, a featherweight fighter is not expected to fight against a heavyweight.
Thus even if gender/sex segregation fulfills some social functions, maybe we could devise some other mechanisms (e.g., segregation by skill level or size) to achieve those functions. Or maybe we couldn’t. Until we have identified the purposes we’re trying to achieve, I can’t imagine how we’d judge.